Niles and Daphne Take Center Stage in Frasier's Seventh Season

Back when Cheers was still on the air, I used to catch an episode now and then, but I was too young to really appreciate it, and I mostly just liked the theme song. Of the characters, my least favorite was Dr. Frasier Crane, a smug psychiatrist, so it seems a little odd that, years later, I started watching Frasier, but around the time I was in college, I was pretty caught up in it.

I suppose it helped that the erudite psychiatrist and his equally effete brother Niles were always making allusions to works of literature I studied in my college English classes, and I loved the clever wordplay of the titles that preceded each scene. It was one of the quirky touches that made the show so distinct. Additionally, when I was a freshman, I went through a particularly powerful obsession with the music of Art Garfunkel, which I’d always loved but hadn’t really listened to in years. When I read that he once had a voice-only guest spot as a man who calls into Frasier’s radio program, I began watching the re-runs as often as I could in hopes that I would see that episode. I still haven’t. But I did see a lot of other good ones.

As the series begins, Frasier has relocated from Boston to Seattle, where his crusty dad, Martin (John Mahoney), a retired cop, and his younger brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), a psychiatrist with a private practice, reside. Niles and Frasier are two peas in a pod, and they love taking in fine culture and talking about it over complicated coffees at their favorite shop, Café Nervosa. While they are very much in sync with each other, they also frequently find themselves in competition.

Martin is much more down-to-earth, which causes some friction. He moves in with Frasier, and he insists upon filling his son’s condo with such distasteful elements as his ratty old chair and his shrewd Jack Russell Terrier, Eddie (Moose / Enzo). He swills beer and watches sports. He tires of his sons’ constant high-falutin’ talk. His kind but tough live-in physical therapist, an Englishwoman named Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves), has much more in common with the father than the sons, but Niles adores her, first for her beauty, then for her sweetness. Meanwhile, Frasier must daily deal with Roz Doyle (Peri Gilpin), the street-smart, promiscuous producer of his radio show. These six characters form the core of the show.

I mostly watched Frasier in syndication, but season seven was when I really became a fan, and as I watched all those older episodes in which timid Niles sighed over Daphne, I became anxious to see whether he would ever let her in on his feelings, and I found myself watching more current episodes. At first, Niles is merely infatuated with her. In fact, he is a married man, so his appreciation for Daphne’s finer features hardly is something to encourage. But as the seasons wear on, and Niles is still pining for Daphne years after his marriage to a deranged socialite dissolves, rooting for the two of them to give it a shot feels more inevitable. By the seventh season, it had become the central question of the series.

Thus, I tend to think of season seven as Frasier’s most pivotal. Pierce is a brilliant actor, and just as Brad Garrett so often steals the show on Everybody Loves Raymond as Ray’s lumbering, resentful brother Robert, so Pierce gets most of the biggest laughs with his fidgety bundle of insecurities and compulsions. Yet by this point in the show, he is also the most compelling dramatic character. I ached for him in the many moments when he nearly gets up the nerve to tell Daphne just how much he cares about her, only to lose heart at the last minute or have something come along and interrupt him.

Pierce embodies that angst perfectly, and show creators David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee drag out the tension as long as they possibly can. Daphne is always entirely congenial with Niles, but the writers go out of their way to leave her feelings toward him ambiguous as long as possible. Particularly with her role as an employee of the family, it seemed that it was up to Niles to bare his soul even if she shared his regard, and I know I shouted at the TV for him to do so on more than one occasion, even as I thought, Well, would I have the guts to do it? No, probably not. And if I tried, I’d probably just end up sticking my foot in my mouth. So I could sympathize with his plight. But I knew I was going to be pretty aggravated if all of this anticipation was not rewarded.

This season finds Daphne engaged to lawyer Donny Douglas (Saul Rubinek), which means plenty of agitation involving her overbearing relatives, especially her mother (Millicent Martin) and her destructively boorish brother Simon (Anthony LaPaglia). Niles, bemoaning all his missed chances to declare his feelings for Daphne, embarks upon a series of whirlwind relationships that leads him to Dr. Mel Karnofsky (Jane Adams), a woman as icy and abrasive as Daphne is warm and compassionate. No one can stand her, and it’s pretty plain that Niles can’t either; he’s just getting married in an effort to get over losing Daphne, which always struck me as an absurdly stupid thing to do. Far better to remain single than get hitched to someone who makes you miserable. She does provide some funny moments, but she’s so hard to take that I mostly just cringed whenever she showed up.

Aside from all the complications of these two impending marriages, which are set for the same week, the season does have some individual episodes that aren’t quite so wrapped up in the romantic drama. My favorite of these is A Tsar Is Born, in which Frasier and Martin are startled to learn that they are both fans of Antiques Roadshow, though for different reasons. When the PBS series comes to town looking for treasures culled from Seattle attics, Martin brings along a kitschy old clock and is astonished to discover that it once belonged to the Romanov family. Frasier decides to do some digging, figuring this must mean that the Cranes are descended from Russian royalty, but his findings are not quite what he had anticipated. Another great one is The Late Dr. Crane, in which a case of mistaken identity leaves most of Seattle believing that Frasier is dead.

Frasier was an unusual sit-com that was equal parts family and workplace comedy, with plenty of pathos and romance mixed in. I would say that I probably fall about halfway between the Crane brothers’ intellectual elitism and their father’s salt-of-the-earth kick-back style, so I found plenty to identify with on both ends, and I was more invested in the seventh season than any other. Of course, it’s that much better with the first six seasons behind it, so I highly recommend this season, but I wouldn’t start here. It’s worth it to really get to know these characters first.