scrambled eggs all over my face

S2 E1 “Slow Tango in South Seattle”

2011-11-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

Pompous Frasier Crane, a successful psychiatrist with a Seattle radio show, returns for another hilarious round of comedy that has him ice fishing with Marty and Niles and taking a girlfriend on an ill-fated trip to Bora Bora. Also this season, Frasier and Niles open a restaurant, and Frasier plays matchmaker for Daphne -- while the unhappily married Niles begins to lust after her. –Netflix description of Frasier season two.

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Imagine for a second there was a book about your first sexual experience. This book described in overwrought detail your lovemaking prowess, your naked body, your sexual tics and unique appetite. How would your family respond to the existence of such a book? In my Catholic household I’m sure the topic would go forever unmentioned, the book avoided like a leper. Even if your family were less reserved than mine, I would assume they would politely decline the opportunity to read of your sexual exploits as a teenager.

The Cranes are not like your family or mine. Niles and The Dad, Frasier’s fucking dad, are both really excited to read a vivid account of Frasier’s first time making it Crane in the bed as an 18 year old. They are so excited that they clamor and crawl over one another to be the first to read the book revolving around KGramms sexual adventures.

This is totally fucking disgusting. It is even more disgusting when you put yourself in the place of The Dad or Niles, try to imagine being insanely excited about reading about your brother or sister fucking. So excited that you debase yourself to the level of a six year old lusting after another’s toy, clawing at your dad’s face and turning over a chair in a mad dash to read a description of your family member’s penis.

This book exists because at some point during Frasier’s stay in Boston, unseen by Cheers’ cameras, the good doctor helped J. Peterman overcome writer’s block over a few beers at the bar. He did this by telling him in minute detail, about his first love affair with his piano teacher, even explaining that as an 18 year old he called his chest hair a love rug. This seems a bizarre way to help someone overcome writer’s block, but who am I to judge Fras’s expertise? I have been in a bit of a rut lately, does anyone have any perfectly remembered spring-autumn relationships they could recount to me while we get drunk? I will pay for the beer.

Many years after Frasier told Peterman about his deflowering, the dastardly scribe wrote it down in a book that is now the talk of Seattle! And he didn’t even mention Frasier in his acknowledgments! Frasier is pissed and confronts the scam artist at the radio station and makes him cry. My friends at www.frasieronline.co.uk were not pleased with this plot, Norm Jr. complains that the ep “takes a few too many liberties. The first involves "Cheers" back story issues with this alleged cleansing of the soul with some random writer at the bar, followed by said writer ending up at Frasier's radio station years later.”

What is it like to be a Frasier fanatic (Franatic) and hate plot contrivances? This is the same Norm Jr. who fucking loved it when Frasier’s son showed up in a different episode. Norm just watches every episode of Frasier, cursing the ludicrous plot twists and unbelievable hi-jinks while waiting with bated breath for an appearance by young Freddie, screaming out, “worth it! All worth it!” when he finally appears, like a 13-year-old boy watching an Ashley Judd movie on HBO at 1:30 in the morning. “The rating screen said there was nudity!”

I’m going to give this 73% out of 100, just like Norm Jr.

A few episode highlights: After Frasier gets the writer to cry, his dad is just disgusted that he isn’t happier about it. “You get exactly what you want and you still aren’t happy.” What a weird thing to say. You humiliated this man until he was brought to tears WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?

Also, there is an incredibly long zoom on Frasier while he is reading from Peterman’s book and it is awesome. Apparently Doc is very expressive while he is reading, nodding and frowning and laughing. I am not any good at any sort of computer stuff, so if you will indulge me, please click this link to a short video of him reading and watch it on mute. I think its worth it, I’ve watched it about 10 times and it keeps getting funnier.

S1 E19 "Give him the Chair"

2011-03-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

As Niles and Frasier walk sullenly around a furniture store:
Niles: Dear God Frasier, we've stumbled across Hell's waiting room.

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The Dad is a terrible roommate. He seems to spend all of his time in the living room watching tv (which is awful), he has a dog, he is loud, he is nosy and he frequently asks Frasier to stay out of his own apartment so he can have sex (I was trying to come up with a funny way to say this but it all just sounded so lame). But mostly, he is a self-righteous piece of shit.

The first season of Frasier was being computed by an earlier model of the Frasier-bot, one perfectly designed to win emmys, but with its drama, conflict and emotion levels too high and its hi-jinks and absurdity levels dangerously low. So season one is filled with episodes like "Give Him the Chair," with Frasier and The Dad having serious fights and then contemplating the history of their relationship. I cannot imagine coming home from a long day at work, plopping down and tuning in and dropping out to this. Why is NBC broadcasting an amateur theater version of Death of a Salesman? This is supposed to be funny dammit, not sad and terrible.

These episodes always feature one middle act when all the tensions boils up and Frasier and The Dad have a screaming match that lasts way too long and then the dad whips out his fucking sad dad card and lays it on the table and Frasier feels awful. But fuck that. All of the tension in the first season is based on the strain in their father-son relationship and Frasier's guilt over not connecting with his dad. But why does Frasier feel guilty? The Dad was the dad, Frasier and Niles were just prissy little kids and The Dad was too busy being a fucking jack-off cop to try and spend any time with the little pussies. Whose fucking fault is that? I picture young Frasier coming home from school all excited, his face aglow from a wonderful day of learning at St. Francis of Assissi Elementary School, "Dad, dad we got to listen to Beethoven today during reading hour!" "What do you think you're better than me? I was too busy being a fucking HERO cop to listen to Beethoven or read you faggot. I wish you liked sitting in a stupid chair and drinking off-brand beer and watching TV on mute all the time, THEN I'd have a real boy for a son and not some pussy-whipped smart ass. How come you never ask me to play catch with you Frasier?"

If I had a kid who was smart and into reading and high culture I'd be stoked, and I'd play catch with him and hang out with him a little bit so he grew into a well-rounded adult. But if he was some no-reading buffoon who only liked Nascar and spitting I would shun him, not try to make any impression on him at all and then show up in his life 40 years later, blame him for the way he was raised and then plop myself down in his living room and ruin his whole life. And if he ever asked me to make any concessions to his lifestyle I would just thump my dick down on the table and cry and scream about how he wasn't exactly the same as me as a child and so I justifiably ignored him and now he needs to make things right by catering to my every old man whim!

"Chair" centers around The Dad's famous old chair, an impossibly ugly green and gray recliner covered in duct tape. Frasier doesn't like the chair because its ugly and his apartment is nice, so he goes to a furniture store and buys a leather recliner with a vibrating massage option for his dad. Everyone loves it and it almost brings Daphne to orgasm (yes, seriously because women usually get off by having someone jiggle their asses).

Guess what? The Dad hates it! Even though the chair is a nice new recliner, and its massage option delighted even Niles and Frasier, The Dad demands that Frasier bring his old chair back. Frasier resists, and then The Dad launches into one of the most groan-inducing monologues ever on television. He doesn't want a nice new chair he wants the chair he was sitting in when he saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, when Frasier called him to tell him he had a grandson, when his wife kissed him on the cheek, etc. You can just watch John Mahoney working all of his biggest STAGE ACTOR muscles while he delivers this claptrap. This logic is exactly the reason I have been wearing the same pair of underwear since 1999, why I still have a racecar bed and why my TV sucks (I want to watch the same TV I watched Sesame Street on!).

I guess the Frasier brothers and their loftiness are the butt of the joke on Frasier, but it's the depiction of the working class through The Dad as our surrogate that is truly insulting. Us every-Joes don't like orchestras or art, we can't be bothered with all that high-minded bullshit, we don't even want to do necessary physical therapy, all we want to do is sit in an ugly chair that for some reason holds a spiritual significance, like a Catholic relic, watch TV and drink beer all the time. GARH GARH GARH baseball and beer and manly stuff like poker.

As it always does, this pandering bullshit works on Frasier, and he goes off on a chase for the chair. He finds it at a high school drama club that features a fat (and alive) Brittany Murphy, RIP, and that is staging "10 Little Indians*" that night! Frasier asks for the chair back and the drama teacher tells him he has to wait two weeks. Obviously this will not stand, since The Dad is a big self-righteous baby (a nickname I've suffered before too!) he could never wait two whole weeks to have the chair that he was sitting in the first time he jerked off while sticking his badge up his ass. The lead actor gets food poisoning, and the drama teacher strikes a deal with Frasier that if he will play the lead in the play he can have the chair back that night. I'm sure that was really weird for the parents going to see the play "Oh I thought Chereth was playing the lead in the play, but apparently its some old man, oh well." My favorite part of this scene is when Frasier introduces himself to the drama teacher and she doesn't know who he is, which MAKES TOTAL SENSE. Why does everyone know who Frasier Crane is? Oh yeah of course I know you, you're that guy on AM radio in the middle of the day. How could I not immediately recognize you, everyone in Seattle listens to AM radio aaaalll the time.

Talk radio makes me want to cut my ears off.

As the credits roll we get one last peak into Frasier's life as he delicately sets up a wonderful looking place on the couch to have some sherry and read his book. But then The Dad comes in and turns on the TV and Eddie runs in and ruins everything. What a fucking dick.

7.4 out of 10-As I said, the original Frasier-bot model was designed to win emmys and emmys alone, and obviously something like: beloved character dealing with REAL ISSUES and having emotional turmoil, is the same sort of catnip to Emmy voters that British accents and funny dresses is to Academy voters. But a 22 minute sitcom is the absolute worst place to try to deal with real issues or explore complex emotional issues. The whole thing is just overwrought and amateurish.

Roz is a slut: In a past review I touched upon the genesis of the Roz is a slut joke, but this was the first one that really took the gag into a whole new stratosphere of ridiculousness. Before this episode the jokes were pretty simple, oh yeah you sleep around stuff, boring and offensive but nothing too important. In "Chair" we get a story about Roz coming home in the morning from a night of wild sex and for some reason stopping to talk with a minister who tells her her shirt is on inside out and then propositions her, and of course she is totally into it! Within the story we learn that Roz thinks a church service is called a "show."

I still do not understand why this show is on Lifetime, it absolutely detests women. Every ex-wife/wife is a stuck-up cunt and the women are all retarded.

*When I was a little kid I loved Agatha Christie novels. Are they still awesome? Does anyone know?

S6 E 14 "Three Valentines"

2011-03-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

Frasier: Roz, I'm in Cassandra's hotel room but I'm not sure what that means.
Roz: What it means is that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.

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Late-night television for women is a strange place. I still don't understand why Frasier reruns are shown on Lifetime, the show's only two female characters are a mystical servant and a slutty drunk, but watching these syndicated masterpieces on the channel for women has opened me up to a whole new world of advertising. Years of drunkenly watching sports highlights and the Fox News Channel (no that isn't a joke, and I think this peculiar habit is a large source of my inner rage and misanthropy)has made me well-versed in the ads aimed at the particular sort of man watching TV in the early morning hours, so I hardly even smirk at the male enhancement ads and phone sex hotlines. But apparently the women watching Lifetime at 12 am Central Time are a very insecure and disgusting group. Most of the ads had something to do with physical ailments not typically discussed in mixed company, like colons (thats right, having a colon is an ailment, you girls are not supposed to poop)and stretch marks and body itching. I'm still confused by the Head and Shoulders ad that ran constantly during this hour long block, in which a lady is on a date with a really boring looking dude and she is fucking freaking out about scratching her head. "If I scratch my head it will turn him off" her inner monologue says. What the fuck are you talking about commercial? Unless this girl is going to go all meth-head Fergie and scratch her scalp until it bleeds who gives a shit? "Oh no, I better not react to physical sensations or he'll hate me!" This is weird. Plus the guy in the commercial is kinda busted, why are you so worried about the opinion of a dude who looks like a withered Michael Phelps and whose turn offs apparently include head scratching?

Thankfully she solves the problem by knocking her knife on the floor and then scratching her head below the table. You know what I like better than girls who scratch their heads? Girls who purposefully knock their silverware on the ground and then scratch themselves while they're picking it up like some sort of obsessive compulsive toddler. I bet old man Phelps took her home and gave her her the time of her life after that hot move! I just hope she didn't do anything that might resemble the actions of a natural human being, that would be fucking disgusting. Don't you dare scratch your head brown haired sex robot!

Also, Suzette, if you're reading this. TUESD-AD dude, please.

I was interrupted in the middle of this episode, so I don't have much to say about it, partly because I didn't finish it, but mostly because I sort of enjoyed it. I would rather spend 400 words reviewing a Head and Shoulders advertisement than talk too much about me legitimately enjoying an episode of Beast goes to Seattle. The premise is three Valentine's Day vignettes in which things go horribly awry for our beloved characters. Virginia Madsen is in the second one and the gags were funny.

Anyway...There is a part in this episode in which Frasier says that Roz called one of her boyfriends "The Cricket" because he drones on and on, and Roz corrected him saying that she called him The Cricket because he furiously rubbed his hands together during sex. WHAT? Imagine how insanely creepy that would be. Some dude pounding Peri Gilpin while rubbing his hands together really fast like a preying mantis? How would that even be possible? Also when did the hand rubbing start, at the point of insertion or during foreplay too? Did he give her nipples Indian burns?

I am going to call this move the Mr. Burns, which is when you sleep with a girl and you have such horrible intentions, to never speak to her again or steal from her as you leave or whatever, that you can't help but rub your hands together and twiddle your fingers menacingly while you're boning.
"That chick you went home with last night was kinda hit man."
"I know, I was fucking Mr. Burnsing while I was doing her from behind. She passed out and I snuck out around 4 and stole her blender."

Also, near the end of the second episode of the Lifetime double-header Niles says that Daphne's perfume is called "cherry bark and almonds," and swoons at the thought. Eww. What the hell? Is Daphne a 13-year-old white chick? Who could ever get all amped up on a chick who smelled like a scratch and sniff sticker? Oh you smell heavenly, I feel like I'm in the checkout line at Claire's! My god this is even better than your candy-apple jolly rancher lip gloss!

This is yet more proof that no matter how hard it tries, Frasier-bot will never be able to accurately depict class. Here's a hint Frasier-bot, it cannot be bought with money.

7.9/10 -In my defense both Frasier Online and the Tivo Forum called this the best episode of Frasier ever, so its not THAT awful that I kinda enjoyed it, is it? Also, I only watched 10 minutes of this which is sure to make any viewing of Frasier seem more fun: "that Frasier episode flew by! It only felt like half of an eternity!"

Obama is a Muslim

2011-02-28T09:56:00.000-08:00

And certainly, Beast is arguably from outside the mainstream. But he's trying to mainstream his lifestyle. He's tried to come together as an equal, like Martin Luther King said. The content of his character is what defines him.
-Kelsey Grammer on Hannity and Colmes

They just took 2 million dollars of your hard earned money to manipulate school children into picking fruits and vegetables over cookies and french fries...I don't know about you but I don't want the federal government in my schools-in my kid's lunch bag.
-Glenn Back

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Hey, remember when fake America elected a black guy for president? Well, that reminded me how upset I am about the national debt or taxes or something. So, even though I spent 8 years cumming on the American flag while a real American president increased the national debt and expanded the government and the government's ability to spy on us and jail us without cause, I am now, suddenly, mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore.

Paying teachers a living wage and requiring food companies to tell us what they put in our food and encouraging kids to stop getting so fucking fat and trying to provide health care to people is too much BIG GOVERNMENT. Whereas actively spying on me, looking in my mail, monitoring my phone calls and invading countries is responsible government! So, I've come up with a solution. Since it was two wars, constant corporate hand outs, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and a relaxing of regulation on the banking industry that led to our horrific debt problem and the collapse of our financial system, it is only logical that we solve the problem by slashing any social programs that make this country livable, doing away with pensions that government workers have been paying into from their own salaries, cutting education to the point where inner-city schools will have 60-plus kids in a classroom and generally eliminating anything positive the government could ever do for anyone. Because, to me, a real American, the only things that are at all important is that the government continue buying a shit ton of missiles, continue to devote precious resources to killing Arabs, not raise taxes on people who are obscenely wealthy and continue spying on me. These are the real values of real Americans.

It is also incredibly important to me that the people who rape me from Washington DC are Christian and do not support a woman's right to choose or the right of faggots to marry. I don't care if you do not do anything but look after your own self interests and constantly make decisions that actively harm me, so long as you pretend to worship the same sky-God as me and try to prevent other people from being happy or making their own decisions about their bodies. Oh yeah, that's right, it is totally ok for you to not let a woman decide what to do with her uterus, but it IS NOT ok for you to tell me I should stop giving my 2-year-old Mountain Dew Code Red and a bag of Doritos for breakfast. Stay out of my life government! Unless you're in my life to spy on me and confirm I am not a Muslim, then, come on in!

Couldn't the money spent on bullshit like Medicaid be used for something more useful? Is Medicaid the one for poor people or old people? The one for old people should stay, because real Americans get old, but they are never poor. Or if they are poor they are poor in a folksy way and would much rather mortgage Uncle Segregation's farm to pay for an operation than accept any handouts from Chairman Obama and Nancy "Mouthy Bitch Cunt Vagina Pussy Woman" Pelosi. All of our nation's bootstraps will go dangerously un-pulled-upon if we keep doling out money that is the rightful property of rich people and corporations. That money should be used to make our country more attractive to the companies that are going to keep outsourcing our jobs no matter what. We wouldn't even have outsourcing if it weren't for fucking unions, who have made it impossible to do business here by forcing those poor companies to pay fair wages to their employees. Those entitled union workers, who think a full time job should pay them enough to live. Fuck you. I don't have benefits and I don't want them, I just want to make sure no one else has them either. Whose side am I on? No hesitation buddy, I'm on the side of the people who are actively trying to fuck me over.

2011-01-25T12:54:00.001-08:00

S1 E16 "The Show Where Lilith Comes Back"

2011-01-16T15:40:00.001-08:00

Dr. Lilith Sternin: I'm here for a convention and I happened to hear your voice on the radio. I kept hoping that you'd introduce Pearl Jam's latest hit, but to my chagrin, you were doling out worthless little advice pellets from your psychiatric Pez dispenser.

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It happened to your dad and its happening to me.

Four episodes in a row of this 37-prime-time emmy winner and my standards have started to wear down. "By the end of this season this show had gotten a lot better," I exclaimed thoughtlessly to Mr. Hunky, A.A. Dowd during this episode. But the show is still only bumping into mediocrity, dulling my senses with its laugh track and forced whimsy. In Frasier-land quality is entirely a matter of comparison. Compared to episode one of Frasier, episode 16 is a masterpiece. Compared to Mad About You, the second season of 3rd Rock from the Sun is like the fourth season of Caroline in the City.

As my standards have ebbed it seems I'm growing more bitter in my prose. What a wasted life, what a sad state of affairs. Week after week millions kept an appointment with Beast and Co. In 1999, 20 million viewers a week watched Frasier hide in closets and make faux high-brow allusions. A housewife supports a ridiculous lifestyle and spoils three children based on the vacant stares of Americans. Across the sea a UK web site is devoted to celebrating this highlight of American mediocrity. The popularity of this Seattle story compels stewardesses to bed married hairy actors. Here in Chicago I've spent the entire Sabbath watching and commenting upon it. I find myself only being able to ask why.

Not of my own wasted day, because I don't think this has been a waste. For the atheistic among us today is set aside for hangovers and relaxing, I am not hung over but I am full and relaxed, there is nothing more restful than the soothing repetition of a Frasier episode. Had I watched this asleep it would hardly matter. Lilith is here, Frasier is naked, Frasier has an invisible son, family rift is humorous, psychiatrists are pointless, Christ is risen, Lilith mentioned Pearl Jam, Roz belongs to a union, Eddie is funny/adorable/likely dead now.

I do not judge the working stiffs who dulled themselves on Frasier's hardened repetition. I am just confused at our, my, aptitude for self-defeating. Surely time could be better spent after a taxing day then to tune in and drop out as Must See TV loudly suggested we do. And yet I feel myself pulled, like so many others, when I am taxed and numbed by a day at a desk to go deeper into the k-hole. To numb myself from my own lack of feeling.

9.5/10-For a Frasier episode, this is pretty good.

"I didn't realize. All that was going on in life and we never noticed. Take me back - up the hill - to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute? (she sighs) I'm ready to go back. I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people."

S1 E16: "The Show Where Lilith Comes Back"

2011-01-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

This is actually one of the better "Frasier" episodes I've seen, one of the few that makes me half-way understand why Emmy voters and dads kept this unholy beast alive for 11 fucking years. I say this through gritted teeth, begrdugingly. "Frasier" is best enjoyed as a novelty. It's probably fair to say I watch it "ironically," though that couches my appreciation for its genuine weirdness in a wink-wink way I'm not entirely comfortable with. We started watching this show as a case study in the mediocrity of American television. Several years, many hours and not enough blog posts later, and I'm ready to confess that it's a supremely bizarre approximation of human interaction. Simply put: people do not behave this way. Not even on TV. If those super-intelligent future androids from A.I. were to dig up the complete series of "Frasier" as some artifact of 2oth century living, they'd be subject to some serious misunderstandings on how our species operates.

Unless they watched this episode or a select few like it. Now, don't get me wrong. Quality or humor or recognizable human behavior are relative distinctions when talking about the FrasierVerse. This ain't exactly a profound study on the modern man. The Brit still acts all loony. Niles preens and minces like he's shouldering the burden of laughter in a "serious" episode. And Lilith, who appears on the show for the first time, enters the ep like a bull in a china shop. (Being this openly bitchy to a person you haven't seen in years is vintage "Frasier".)

But the way the ep characterizes Frasier as basically a selfish horndog--and then calls him on it!--is unusually candid for the series. There aren't a lot of laughs here, intentional or otherwise. It's a "serious" episode that reads as rather believably serious. The closest I came to even derisive laughter was a dated mention of Pearl Jam. (I kinda wonder not only if Frasier knows who they are, but if Kelsey Grammar does either.)

Solid episode--but if they were all this passably decent, this blog wouldn't exist.

7 Stars.

S1 E15 "You Can't Tell a Crook by his Cover"

2011-01-16T14:39:00.001-08:00

Frasier: Excuse me, dad, if I can interrupt that self-righteous police mentality for a second, don't you believe in second chances?
Martin: I did. Then we had Niles.

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The hate shines through in this episode. The dad's hatred of his sons, Daphne's hatred of the Crane's, Niles' hatred of the lower class, "He's being pretty cavalier about his tips for someone who drives a van," Niles scoffs of a lowly service-industry wage-slave, it is all on display in the third installment of Frasier Day and the hatred drives the episode into a season highlight.

Most of "Crook" is based on two scenes, the first takes place at Frasier's place, in which Frasier lurks behind a group of his dad's friends playing poker, drinking sherry and trying to figure out which one of them is a criminal. No, it doesn't matter why. He is unable to pick out the crook, but Daphne does end up agreeing to go on a date with Martin's ex-con poker buddy. Because the guy spent time in jail and he is a low-class buffoon his idea of a first date is a two-table pool room and a premature, hamfisted pass.

The dad and Niles are NOT happy about this, and both depict Daphne as some sort of virginal asset to be protected, if it didn't say otherwise on Wikipedia I'd almost think Sylvester Stallone directed this episode but nope, Frasier-bot just shares Sly's obsession with those nefarious others looking to steal away the prized purity of our women. To stop this low-class defilement, the Brothers Crane go to the dangerous pool hall where the criminal has taken Daphne, only to find that the Scot has already given the ex-con the boot and is now just holding court with a group of pool-hall hooligans.

Predictably Daphne can take of herself, but the Crane's stumble into a dispute with a ruffian looking to "pulp" them, and only Daphne's quick thinking and a gag stolen from "The Graduate" can save them.

8 out of 10. When Frasier tells Niles about Daphne and the convict Niles says that Frasier must be "yanking [his] giggle chain." After last episode's hand-job joke I'm noticing a trend here for Niles, and I'm betting he gave his giggle chain a good yanking while thinking about Daphne and that dirty, nasty, low class convict taking liberties with her soft, white, European skin.

S1 E15: "You Can't Tell a Crook By His Cover"

2011-01-16T14:39:00.000-08:00

It's always embarrassing to get caught laughing at a "Frasier" joke. The shame burns under your collar. You feel naked and exposed, as though someone were seeing just a little too far into you. It's like when you mom walks in on you masturbating. But sharing a Frasier laugh? That's a rare and special feeling, like planets aligning. Non-dads rarely laugh in unison at "Frasier." It's just mathematically unlikely. The hit-to-miss ratio of Frasier-bot's funny software basically assures a chuckle or two per episode. And these titters are usually random, a product of mere fatigue. "I'm watching a comedy," your brain cries. "I should create the sensation of amusement at some point." This approximation of funny strikes rational non-dads at different times, so in the rare instance that one "Frasier" joke tickles two funny bones, you want to celebrate. It's like belatedly noticing that you're masturbating in the same room as some one else... to the same magazine. And then someone else's mom walks in. Quote me on that.

Pat and I shared a genuine laugh on this one. We locked eyes and then looked away quickly. Best to not acknowledge it. We had to share the shame. Joke was about Roz. Surprise surprise, she proved neither a slut nor a lush in this instance, just a dupe. Poor girl's the victim of a con artist-- it was a half-way shrewd way to kick off an ep that's about spotting criminals among us. Marty and Fras make a wager that the good doc can't pick an ex-con out of a line-up. He invites three friends over, one of whom served time. This seems like a pretty good set-up for an episode--I predicted that FrasFans call this one a "first season gem". (Anyone want to confirm that? I'm too lazy to check and I only have 22-minutes to pen this masterpiece.) And the Bot does not disappoint. My favorite moment arrives when Marty's marks, a lady, comments on how beautiful Daphne is, prompting Frasier to posit that time behind bars may have turned her into a lesbian. Priceless.

There's enough plot in this one to power three "Fraiser" eps. Eventually, the Brothers Crane stumble into the quaintest wrong-side-of-the-tracks bar this side of a high school production of West Side Story. (Fun Fact: PK Smith himself played a Jet on stage in his formative years. Bet he looked harder than these "rough-necks.") Fans of the pool episode of "Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire" should get a kick out of this one, though I say it shows it's hand (mixing game metaphors!) a little too soon.

82 on the Pitchfork scale.

S1 E14: "Can't Buy Me Love"

2011-01-16T13:35:00.001-08:00

Frasier-Bot has some very strange notions on female desire. Chief among them, that a gaggle of sexy single ladies would find a balding, fussy radio psychiatrist absolutely irresistible. One of the big, running gags on this show involves finding Fras often minutes away from touching down with some chick waaaaay out of his league, only to fumble it in the final seconds. (That's right folks, a sports metaphor. The good doctor himself could probably make a better one, but given me an A for effort at least.) So often does this particular plot device rear its head that we've dubbed it a template: Frasier Embarrasses Himself In Front of a Beautiful Woman. What the Fras-Bot fails to ever convincingly convey is why these ladies would ever dig his vibe in the first place.

Case in point: episode 14 here hinges on the dubious premise that a supermodel would pay $500 for a dinner date with the doc. I don't buy it, but then, if I get hung up on doubts like that, we'll be here all day. (And we will be, folks. Stick around.) The first few minutes of any Fras ep are always a wheel-spinning wash; this bad boy doesn't kick into second gear until right before the first commericial break. Bulldog, Fras and some other local "celebrities" get roped into a charity auction, where an army of (unseen) sexually-starved women barter for their company. After the feeding frenzy--you just know Frasier-Bot thinks its being "subversive" by making the men objects of leering desire--Crane finds out that a beautiful model has "purchased him." Cue ensuing delightful misunderstanding.

This ep eventually proves itself to be a combo, with Fras both humiliating himself in front of said beautiful woman and learning a lesson. But seriously, what kind of woman entrusts a complete stranger--even one who's a "celebrity"-- to watch her 13-year-old child? Standard issue. This review bores me as much as the episode did. Niles makes a handjob joke, Daphne gets shit-faced and Bulldog gets dragged screaming into the night by some aggro stranger. So it's not a total loss.

Final note: one of the episode cards reads "Driving Miss Daphne." Come on Frasier-Bot, stop teasing me with the offensive racial farce you have swimming around in your hard-drive. I want Kelsey in blackface!

S1 E14 "Can't Buy Me Love"

2011-01-16T13:35:00.000-08:00

madbaldscotsman Rick Elliott
@Kelsey_Grammer Your character as Frasier inspired me to take the high road and be a more descent man. #properetiquette

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Yep. I'm already at the point where I'm mining the bowels of the interweb for material. How, how, how did this show last so long? What is going on? Why have these choices left me so broken?

This episode centers around a charity bachelor auction and an evening Frasier spends with a 12-year-old. It's a Frasier embarrasses himself in front of a beautiful woman episode, unfortunately the main plot is disappointingly free of hijinks and the embarrassment slides into introspection much too quickly. Episode director and Oberlin alum James Burrows has a tendency to rush past the comedic elements of any given episode so as to dive into the sentimental, a tactic that serves him well at times but leaves "...Love" feeling a bit hollow. You can't pour this much sentimental syrup onto a plate so devoid of comedy flapjacks!

After the auction, which features today's first Roz is a slut joke (Roz chasing hungrily after a Seahawks linebacker), Frasier prepares a dinner at his home for him and the beautiful woman who purchased the date for $500 at the auction. But she shows up to his apartment with her 12-year-old daughter and explains that she just got a modeling gig for THAT NIGHT, and has no one to watch her kid. It makes total sense of course that she would entrust this task to a single 40-year-old man she's never had a conversation with, so she does, and even says she will be back later and will spend the night, which of course convinces Frasier to agree to watch her daughter. So the episode centers around a mother trading sex for a few hours of baby sitting, a decidedly creepy plot point the show treats as totally normal.

Her daughter, Renata, proceeds to act just like you would expect a TV 12-year-old to act, she eats junk food and talks on the phone repeating "No way!" over and over, describing things as "so fresh," and asking what Frasier's "damage is." Now for me, anytime I agree to babysit a pre-teen in exchange for sexual favors from her mother, I just give the kid the phone and a bag of Munchies and make myself scarce. Maybe get the bed ready for my "payment" and then read a book. But not Frasier, even though he, presumably, has a bedroom, he sits right next to the brat while she yaks on the phone and then whines that she isn't paying attention to him. "We're supposed to spend the evening together and you haven't said one word to me," he says to her after hanging up the phone in the middle of her phone conversation. So they eat cookie dough and she weaves a tale of a distant uncaring mother.

When her super hot mom arrives and sends her daughter away with a simple peck on the head Frasier confronts her and totally blows his shot at getting paid...err layed. In turns out the daughter was lying and now Frasier had to spend time with a kid and he's been dumped! Call me crazy but I think having her daughter babysat by a mildly famous stranger and then immediately sending her daughter off so she can fuck said stranger lead me to believe this model may not be such a great mom, but that doesn't matter, what does matter is that Fras is not going to be getting it in.

Grade: B. The highlight is definitely a Daphne subplot in which she is a huge drunk bitch to Bulldog, leaves him to be beaten up by strangers in a parking lot and then goes joy riding in a limo.

S1 E13 "Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast"

2011-01-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

Dad: I don't know if you remember but I have warm toes.

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What a way to kick things off. Episode 13 of Frasier's inaugural season is awesome in the abstract but boring in execution, which is kind of the unspoken thesis of every review I've ever written for this blog. It's good to see the first ever episode to deal with the dad as a sexual being and Frasier's discomfort with the concept since the dad's sexual adventures will get weirder and creepier as time goes on.

God I was hoping so hard for the dad to bring a black chick to the breakfast table and then find out Fras-has a little racism inside, but no, the title is the weakest of allusions, and the Frasier-bot isn't wired to deal with those kinds of issues. The "who" coming to breakfast is a woman from Frasier's building who's got it bad for ex-cops. She surprisingly emerges in Frasier's kitchen in the morning after a dinner date with the dad. I'll admit to one legitimate laugh during the episode, when Frasier stumbles and hams through the awkward breakfast and asks the lady if she likes to keep the lights on during sex. She probably does, I'm imagining one of those cliche'd movie scenes where she traces the dad's hip-surgery scar with her finger and he tells a story that shows his surprising vulnerability but reassuring inner strength. "You know, even when I was in those tough spots, and chasing bad, bad men as a police officer I never felt afraid. Not out of bravery, I just didn't know any better, but when my wife died, all the fear hit me. I was so scared of the unknown, all I could think was, what do I do now?"

"Sigh."

After he gets all Frasier-manic at breakfast and scares his dad's lover off, Frasier commences to prove just how profoundly weird his radio show is by talking about his dad's sexual tryst on the air. This offends his dad's new chick, who feels exposed, and the dad berates Frasier for fucking up his dick-game. Frasier publicly apologizes to the building mate (I cannot remember this chick's name) trying to make good, but it takes the dad reminding her that he has "warm toes" to really win her back...Foot fist way. I'm pretty sure the implication is that the dad is into some freaky foot-penetration shit, which is cool. I think I saw a video about this once...

2 out of 3 somethings. The is almost too perfect a beginning to Frasier Day, boring and weirdly sexual.

S1 13: "Guess Who's Coming To Breakfast?"

2011-01-16T12:24:00.000-08:00

Don't let the title fool you. I hoped and prayed that this would be the episode wherein Frasier-Bot finally had the gall to twist the good doc's entrenched class condescencion into sitcom-friendly racial discomfort. Think: Niles brings home a Detroit sister, like Kip in the horseshit-racist Napoleon Dynamite, and Fras spends the whole episode trying to relate to her/not offend her. It'd drop more jaws and raise more protest signs than "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer"--and "Frasier" fantatics would chuckle through the thing like it was business as usual. Alas, this is business as usual, another ep where Fras has to grapple with the fact that his old man's a person and not just, you know, his dad. (As my prolific partner in crime posited recently: is this really such a mind-blowing revelation? Especially for a man in his 40s?) Anyway, The Dad bangs a betty who lives in his building, and Frasier fumbles through the morning after like a marble-mouthed buffoon. And then, in a spectatacular display of head-slappingly oblivious assholery, broadcasts the old babe's walk of shame on his radio show. He basically gets a free pass for this, too--Frasier will be Frasier, nevermind the magnificent invasion of privacy. This is standard-issue to the max, notable only for revealing that Marty likes to foot fuck ("Remember my warm toes?" he lustily cooes at his embarassed bed fellow in the elevator, while Fras stands not two feet away, pretending not to listen.) Creepy stuff, though the gross-out highlight is when a caller laments not being to stuff her child back into the womb. Even a weirdo perv like Crane has to wince. One lingering question: what happened to Frasier's Friday-night date? That's just sloppy writing, Frasier-bot. C+

Genuine laughs: a few. Frasier telling the school bullies where to find this condescending little shit who calls in got a laugh out of me.

FRASIER DAY

2011-01-16T11:46:00.000-08:00

...and so it begins. My silent partner and I are embarking on an adventure that could change us forever. Sometimes the roads we take leave us stranded, and the choices we make leave us broken...the road we've taken has led us to this point, wherein we will be watching a marathon of Frasier episodes and responding to them in real time. After an episode is completed we each have 22 minutes to craft a response and put it up...

S1 E7 "Call me Irresponsible"

2010-10-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

Frasier: This is killing me! You think I don't want to pick you up right now, carry you over to that Eames classic and show you why it's the best-engineered chair in the world?!

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I watched this one on the Megabus as I headed home for depressing reasons, so I am grateful it wasn’t quite as dreary and sad as the first few episodes of Season One. “Call me Irresponsible” starts with a call from Bruno Kirby, (initially I thought he was Joe Pesci) who is debating whether he should break up with his commitment-hungry long-term girlfriend. Kirby explains that he doesn’t want to commit for fear that someone better will come along. The good doctor counsels Bruno to break up with her for both of their sakes, and, like anyone who is having a difficult time making a decision, Kirby immediately does as he’s told.

Sometime later Kirby’s dumpee shows up to the station to confront Frasier about him causing the end of her relationship, and she promptly delivers the classic line: “oh you radio psychiatrists!” Then she accuses Frasier of giving this advice as an attempt to chase ratings. I love this, as if there are so many radio shrinks and they’re all the same, always chasing those numbers! …Good one Frasier-bot.

For some reason Frasier buys her peanut eminems (correct spelling) and they talk about relationships. Boy is it unique too! She complains about repetitive small talk on first dates, then he complains about having to pay for dinner, then she eats an eminem of his hand in a seductive (?) way and their whirlwind romance begins.

I’m not going to describe the sexy peanut eminem consumption because I want you to imagine it for yourself, either try to figure out how a person could possibly inhale a piece of candy from Kelsey Grammer’s hand in a sexy way, or imagine K-Gramms presenting Marshall’s Slim Shady for a woman to eat. Either way it’s a gross image. Product Placement!

The Scot and the dad and Eddie are only in this thing for 2 minutes, and it’s even more proof of my Frasier is written by a machine theory. The “subplot,” if you can call it that, is one scene in which Daf sets up a Christmas card photo shoot on October 21. The show of course recognizes that this is odd, and mines all the comedy gold it possibly can from the situation, but what Frasier bot fails to explain is why this is happening. It makes absolutely no sense and is obviously thrown into the middle of the episode just to put the dad in a silly hat and have Eddie wear antlers. I think it shows a surprising lack of patience from the computer that it couldn’t just wait another two months to get both of these things and more. If you’re going to do this Niles should have been dressed in an elf costume in a desperate attempt to win Daphne’s heart. I can’t do your job, 17 years after the fact, for you Frasier machine!

This is the picture they ended up using for the card. I'll let you decide if the Dad is Rob Thomas or Usher. It's obvious Beibs is Eddie.

Back to the plot, this is a Frasier learns a lesson while embarrassing himself in front of a beautiful woman ep. As a setup Niles informs us that Frasier throws up when he faces a breach of ethics. So just as he’s about to show the eminem slurper why the Eames Lounge is the best engineered chair in the world (his words) Frasier starts making a ridiculous gagging sound. Thank goodness the show didn’t stick to this contrivance because the plot of literally every Frasier episode to follow is about radio-doc breaching his ethics. Think about how much vomit would be underneath the beds and in the closets of Frasier’s world if they had kept this tic. The show ends with a shirtless Fras breaking up with Bruno’s babe because she makes him want to throw up. Frasier is harrier than Robin Williams’ hands.

7.7/10 Points for this beautiful woman being legitimately beautiful, the disembodied voice of Bruno Kirby does not fuck around with ugly chicks.

P.S. I watched about a third of an episode last week after coming home gin-drunk. Gin is the getting busy drink and I got basic cable busy. Anyway I don’t remember enough to write a review proper, but I would like to share with you the notes I took that night (something I never do), which were nearly illegible.

-Reading parade banter on the couch.
-Hillbilly buffet.
-Frasier hates black lady.
-Malcolm in the middle mom.
-“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than denial” True?
-Color contacts
-[illegible] cowboy hat
-Managua Nicaragua riff – amazing
-rival radio psychiatrist
-punches santa
-McNulty’s wife?

Fuck it I should just write a review based on the notes.

S4 E16 "The Unnatural"

2010-08-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Frasier [to Frederick]: You're going to see me play softball today, and I'm not going to play very well. The truth is, I'm not a good softball player.

Frederick: Why are you called Bulldog?
Bulldog: I don't know - people just call me that.
Frederick: But why?

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The first line up there is all me, I took notes on this episode. Journalism.

The second quote though is from a fan site recap of the episode, and seriously what the fuck? These sort of things are my inspiration for living, the fact that there is someone out there, at least one person, who thinks that exchange is either funny or somehow remarkable just drives me mad with desire. I cannot stop thinking about it. I want to meet this person and explore his mind. That is one of the "episode highlights" according to Frasier Online, and commentor on the site who gave the episode a 79% (cool) called that exchange between Frasier-seed and Bulldog a "very funny little moment."

It is possibly the least interesting thing the Frasier-machine has ever created.

Also from Frasier Online (a British site by the way, what is it with the Brits and American mediocrity? Is it just to make them feel better about the war and Mike Skinner?) is this tidbit from Norm Jr. of California: this episode's "completely uninvolving premise" is "mostly excusable" for the chance to get a visit from Beast's son Frederick "worked in." Again, who are you? I want to spend my whole life with you.

Imagine what a great time you could have with someone who gets excited about a "Frederick" episode in Frasier! What does Norm do when something even marginally cool happens? (Green light!) Nothing against young Fred but on the scale of things that could happen, watching an episode of Frasier in which his son appears registers as kind of a bummer. At best it's neutral. And Norm is super stoked! Hanging out with Norm would be like hanging out with a baby. I haven't even explored the "completely uninvolving premise" line, I'm not sure I have the room in my heart to do so! This means J.R. finds most Frasier premises involving! How so Norm? How so?

Like all things in life, maintaining Frasier fanhood requires that we lie. What is inexcusable is that it forces us to lie to ourselves. The editor of Frasier Online, and Norm and all those beautiful souls like him, is forced to pretend that an excruciating segment between Young Windbag and Bulldog is an episode highlight, how else to continue on but to grin and laugh when the track does? Admitting that nothing in this episode gets above being mildly perturbing would be to admit that Frasier-bot is not the dream machine we imagined and no episode has truly fulfilled us. Surely the emmy voters watched the Crane's sipping wine, heard Daphne's accent and felt multi-syllabic words bounce through their heads and told themselves something smart had happened. Just as Academy members hear the word holocaust and start handing out awards, just as Decemberists fans hear excruciatingly boring music and are sure there is genius in the monotony. We enjoy things in a context, and for these fine folks that context involves a web site devoted to Frasier. As does mine.

And so in that context I searched madly for something to grab a hold of. Some thread to pull me back from the abyss of a sentimental Frasier episode.

Leave it to Mr. 79% to root out the needle in the haystack: Niles and Frederick competing for Daphne's affection. Shit is real disgusting. It seriously had me pining for those beautiful days when the creepy sexuality was emanating from the dad's over-used loins and Frasier's oedipus complex. In The Unnatural (such a clever title too!) Freddy has a crush on the Scot that would be gross on its own. The over-fed, over-smug child keeps eliciting hugs from Daf and mugging for the camera. It's fucking weird. Kid's aren't sexual like this, predatory and sneaky. Forcing this sort of under-handed flirting into the mouth of a child is a sin, imagine how weird it would be if Niles' pathetic swooning was done by a chess club 10-year-old, gross right?

And then the machine just makes it worse, as Niles looks on with seething jealousy at Freddy's every advance. There is something really distasteful about a grown man feeling genuine jealousy toward a child for receiving a hug from his dad's nurse. And yet the bot just keeps milking the premise for gross laughs, never once considering the ramifications. The only legitimate highlight of the episode is K-Gramm's big ass head in a softball helmet. It is pretty cool actually.

Yes, the plot involves softball, the set-up is too boring and simple to explain here, but the crux of the episode is the anticipation of the moment Frederick will realize his dad isn't perfect. Frasier-bot was not the first or the last to trot out this trope, and its prevalence in our culture makes me wonder if I'm missing something. I certainly don't remember any watershed moment, when my father fell from Zeus to Hercules. I'm sure my feelings towards Poppa Smid weren't always a reasonable, aware admiration, but I don't remember when I realized my father was a man to emulate and not one to worship. To me my father's fallibility was something known once memory began. Just as I don't remember learning to speak, I don't remember when I viewed the error of man on display. It seems like the memory would be an eerie one, who remembers being that innocent? Does this happen in real life?

In the world of mediocre fiction it does, again and again and again. Frasier's moment came when he realized his dad couldn't do math in his head (elitist!), and Freddy's is supposed to be when he realizes the doctor is a klutz, imagine when he finds out Frasier can't ride a bike! Of course one cliche deserves another so we get Frederick as the wise beyond his years child, and the episode closes with a reveal, Freddie already knew his dad was imperfect! Oh the egg on Frasier's face!

79 out of 100, because why the hell not. Only one Roz is a slut/lush joke, in which Roz describes to Fras- how much she wants to grab some guy's butt, but then freddy comes in and she covers for it. Also, the fact that Roz was stalked and harassed to the point of being unable to come out of her house is played for laughs. Domestic violence! Aaaand, my friend told me recently that Roz totally "likes it rude boy." Couldn't agree more.

Shout out to Norm Jr:

"The episode, though, belongs to Frederick's crush on Daphne with everyone except Niles seeing it as harmless. Frederick knows Niles has feelings for Daphne too and sets out to rub his nose in it at every opportunity. Indeed, the episode ends with Daphne giving a depressed Frederick a hug, with Frederick giving Niles a 'Bet you wish this was you' smile - great stuff."

Frasier leaves Lilith for Daphne sound-alike!

2010-08-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

Stewardess' Friend: Kayte is a great girl, Kelsey is besotted with her, they are spending all their time together.

Stewardess' Dad: I'm a big fan of Cheers and Frasier

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Stars, they're just like us!

They get lumpy-butt british "air hoestesses" knocked up (thats right I said HOEstess)!

The chicks that they get pregnant look super dissapointed to be with them!

They constantly try to prove that they're a full head taller than their jump-offs!

Their girlfriends' dads are totally into Frasier and Cheers!

They get besotted!

They wear New Balance sneakers! (Actually this makes him exactly like my dad.)

They apparently cheat on their wives with whatever lame piece of british ass serves them cocktails on Jet Blue Airlines!

So, the voice of Beast from "X-Men: The Last Stand" got some mediocre-looking british flight attendant pregnant.

The producer of "Girlfriends" is the dad-jam equivalent of Shawn Kemp apparently. Five babies with three women? Who the hell are these women who want to have sex with Frasier Crane so badly? It would make sense to me if they were as old as he is, like they grew up with a bad-comedy fetish and always wanted some sort of hackneyed night of hijinks and passion (probably an equal amount of hijinks and passion constantly alternating between the two. Like, oh Frasier's underneath the bed, now hes pulled you down to the floor and is having his way with you! Or, oh Frasier almost got caught taking a Viagra but pretended it was a tic-tac and then you asked for one and he said he couldn't give you one and you asked why and he said it was because he loved the way your mouth tasted au naturale and then you just licked the inside of eachother's mouths! Or, oh Frasier took a call from his wife while you two were doing the beast with two backs (get it beast) and you asked who it was and he said it was his mother but then you overheard his conversation and you heard him say he missed her body on the phone and you asked him what it was about and he said it was a Freudian theory that children should tell their mothers they missed being inside of their bodies as often as possible as a way of mother-son bonding, and then you two did it! Too much?), but these women are all in their 20s. What is it? A way to get closer to your father? Are all of these chicks really into the emmys?

Actually, Seattle's number one radio psychiatrist may be the dad-jam equivalent of T-Pain. The women he's hooked up with are: his dance instructor, a stripper, his make-up artist and now a flight attendant. Much like Teddy Penderass, Frasier is super into women who are required to be nice to him as part of their profession.

Three things I learned from this british gossip magazine article that are more interesting than the republican candidate from "Swing Vote's" sex-life:

The British use the word besotted all the time. It's in this piece like 6 times! What the fuck does besotted mean? I refuse to look it up.

Limeys call first class on an airplane, "upper class" this just seems so much more honest. I think coach should be called proletariat seating. Like, are you in business? No, I'm sittin in prole.

The british think Kelsey Grammer is a celebrity worthy of an entire article with multiple pictures. I think he's a weirdo worthy of a 600-word blog posting. Prolix!

3 out of 8 stars. Its cool that K Gramms has the same taste in women as T-Pain, and the same taste in shoes as my dad. But its not cool to cheat on your wife, especially not with a busted wanker, and it is definetely not cool to get said wanker pregnant.

S10 E21 "The Devil and Dr. Phil"

2010-01-27T19:45:00.000-08:00

Dr Phil mentions that he has had a new agent for a year now:
Dr Phil: Speak of the devil - here she comes.
[Bebe Glazer joins Dr Phil !!]

Dr. Phil is in this episode.

I kinda don't want to do this review. It's very hard to admit when something you've been dreaming about for so long (well, since I saw the ad for it a couple days ago) is actually a bit of a let down. But, I watched the episode, and watched a more boring episode the day before, and if i don't write something about it, then I'm just a white male who spends his evenings watching reruns of Frasier by himself...fuck.

But this ep is not just a bit of a let down, it's an enormous let down, a catastrophic let down. It is just absolutely mind boggling to me that the machine that creates Frasier could fuck up such an ingenious premise. To be fair, it isn't all the Frasier-bot's fault. Dr. Phil is a terrible person, err actor I mean, and he makes the few moments in which he appears even worse than most Frasier scenes.

But it is mostly the machine's fault. Frasier is a pompous windbag, Dr. Phil is too, just program fake therapist vs. fake therapist conflicts one over another, forget any sub plots or anything else and let these two fake morons go at it. It is so easy.

Instead we get very little Fras- and Phil action, and a lot of Frasier and his former devil-agent Bebe going at it in some horribly disgusting flirtatious back and forth. The woman who plays Frasier's ex-agent is absolutely terrible to look at, so terrible that the show doesn't even try to pretend she's a "beautiful woman" and if the Frasier machine won't call you beautiful you must be a real hose-hound.

So of course Frasier keeps almost having sex with her. And its gross. And the dad works nights now and he is old and tired and unbelievably confused, and Niles and Daphne keep spying on an old couple that is having an affair and Frasier thinks Dr. Phil owes him $200, but he doesn't, its just that Frasier doesn't understand poker, because he's an elitist or something.

There, thats the plot. Does that sound like too much to cram into 22 minutes while still leaving room for some tough talk from the DOCTOR. Well, it is. and so we get nothing worthwhile from the texan at all and it totally fucking sucks.

There are no Roz is a slut/lush jokes in this episode, instead Roz is given a story line where she loves Phil, which doesn't fit with her character at all since the DOCTOR is a total moralistic phony and Roz is a down to earth chick who is a drunken whore.

0/10 DR PHIL? FRASIER? NO ONE IN THE ENTIRE EPISODE IS GIVEN QUACK ADVICE? FUCK THAT.

Also, I watched a Dr. Phil once where a 40-year old woman said of a 13-year-old boy: "he come on to me, okay?"

And according to the DOCTOR's website "Dr. Phil has galvanized millions of people to 'get real.'"

ummm ok.

Your Dad Likes This Too

2009-07-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Along with reviewing “Frasier” episodes and entertaining (well, 1 out of 2 and so on) the stated mission of this site is to explore mediocrity, and while I’m still dedicated to that pursuit, it was done first and is done better by the person operating here. What has been taking my attention recently is absurdist entertainment (mostly comedy, keeping in mind I am stretching both the term "comedy" and the term "entertainment" as thin as the “Frasier” machine stretches beauty) masquerading as plain-suburban fare. An example is my January review of the episode “Don Juan in Hell Pt. 2,” an even better example is “The Blue Man Group” (BMG) which I had the chance to see a portion of for free a while back.

I realize it is probably a dereliction of duty that I didn’t stay for the entire show, but this shit was intolerable, had I stayed, I’m not sure I would’ve survived. I expected the show to be an incredibly cheesy but entertaining monochromatic version of stomp (I believe a man in a Pan’s Labrynth shirt with the sleeves cut-off told me it was “tons of fun”). So I was shocked to discover that it was actually some sort of down-syndrome comedy show. Crispin Glover was probably somewhere in the auditorium giving light cues.

The show-proper started as I expected, and the multi-hued drum performance assuaged the rising concern spiked by the crowd warm up, which consisted of drama nerd humor scrolling across an LED screen and everyone laughing nonstop. The only people in the auditorium not laughing aside from my entourage were the brother-sister combo in front of us who were clearly there for free as well, this leads me to conclude that the others weren’t laughing but were actually saying, “I paid hundreds of dollars for this,” in some language unique to Ohio and Indiana. On a side note, the brother, who was probably about 11 years old, was texting non-stop during the beginning of the show and at one point texted: “Do you want your sister to miss you when she goes away to college?” This is an incredibly bizarre sentiment; I don’t think this question has ever been posed before in the history of conversations. Because this question confuses me I’m just going to say that it is creepy.

Unfortunately some over-enthusiastic usher came over and told the kid to cut it out. Usually I am totally opposed to theatre texting, but in this case the texts were by far the most engrossing part of the evening, and the show was just about to take a serious turn for the worse. Almost on cue after the kid quit texting the show descended from an idiotic but entertaining presentation of people with stupid faces hitting puddles of paint with sticks, into a sort of futurist minstrel show. I don't mean there are any racial underpinnings in BMG, its just the easy way to paint a picture of the stage show: We were presented with three garishly painted figures at whose ignorance, idiocy and general outlandishness we were meant to laugh. And most of the audience did in spades (pun intended).

What is especially perplexing about the BMG spectacle is that neither I, nor anyone in my entourage could discern what was supposed to be amusing or entertaining about the performance. Honestly, this was not a matter of humor we found distasteful, or poor comic timing, or humor that was intellectually beneath us. All of these things are recognizable elements of poor comedy, rather I could not even determine what was intended to make me laugh, or, when recognizing an incident that made those around me laugh, I could not tell why (in ANY way) the incident was meant to invoke, and was successful in invoking laughter.

It is possible that this was an instance of humor that was above me. That the fare was too advanced for me even to recognize, like a Texan in Paris, but having surveyed the audience I will say only that if this was the case then the joke is surely on you poor half-dozen fools wasting your time reading someone so far beneath a room of suburbanites and Ohioans...

In the BMG show, the blue men stare wide-eyed into the crowd and this is meant to be funny, they catch balls in their mouths at varying speeds and this is meant to be funny (but not gay!); they pretend to drink a beer; they eat from cereal boxes of different sizes, when they chew their crunching is of disparate volumes, a large cereal box is dropped revealing a smaller box; the blues hold up placards telling anachronistic anti-technology factoids; “pop-stars” from five years ago are critiqued for vapidity; the blues spend 25(!) minutes playing with a twinkie, pretending they cannot open it; the blues stare emptily at a Frasier-style beauty and at one point they all gather together on stage and someone comes up and videotapes the blues rubbing each others’ faces and staring lustily at one another…All of these things received hearty laughter and/or applause! The experience was mind-blowing, excruciatingly mind-blowing.

I am sure it seems I am taking these incidents out of context but I swear there is absolutely no context, no narrative, no segues, no link at all between these confusing antics besides blue makeup and overall absurdity. What was most perplexing is that I wouldn't think something this outlandish would appeal to the sort of people who were in the audience.

If you were to take the elements of the BMG, or most “Frasier” episodes and displace them, presenting them as a video in an art museum, or change the language to French and subtitle them, I believe the very same people who chortle through the performance, or tune in every week, would be alienated and bored by the “art,” presented. It seems increasingly that in meting out what we like and dislike, and in dictating what will be best received by what type of person, presentation and context is far more important than content. It is why Jenna Elfman in an angel costume in “Can’t Hardly Wait” is silly and contrived, but frogs falling from the sky in “Magnolia” is daring and poetic. The sign of a brash filmmaker defying convention. Magnolia is over three hours long and is directed by someone who insists people use his middle name when addressing him, so obviously it is a work to be taken seriously...

Check back next week for my essay comparing Can't Hardly Wait... and Magnolia, a piece mainly designed to piss off the 3 people who read this thing. Two ways that Can't is better, just off the top of my head: There are no Aimee Mann songs in CHW, but instead there are a lot of Third Eye Blind Songs, and CHW features the role that Jerry O'Connell was born to play. An expected highlight: me criticizing Magnolia for being too long in a hopelessly bloated and long winded blog-posting.

S10 E8 "Rooms With a View"

2009-07-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

Frasier: Daphne, I know you're in hell right now, but in just about 20 minutes, comes the disconnecting of the ventilator and the extubation. You can see it all in the diagram on page 24-C...
Daphne: He's not a diagram! He's my husband, and he's on a table with his chest cut open! I'm sorry if I can't handle this as well as the rest of you, but I'm terrified!
Roz: Daphne, it's okay, just calm down. When all this is over, we're just gonna...
Daphne: There is no "when this is over"! There's no tomorrow, no next week, no next year! There's nothing until he comes out of there and I know he's okay!
...................................................................

Oh, this one was a doozy. Serious episodes are always incredibly uncomfortable affairs. I know the emmy-voters would disagree with me, but the actors in "Frasier" are pretty terrible, and so anything that requires more of them than setting up one liners, making faces at a dog or hiding in people's closets as part of an elaborate rouse stretches them almost to the point of breaking...it's really weird to watch.

This one was not directed by a machine but by Beast himself, Kelsey Grammer. And it is amazing. Niles is in the hospital with some sort of heart problem and he has to have a life-threatening operation. In this episode the Niles/Daphne connection is actually a positive, since we get to see the little Scot over-act to an incredible degree. Finally, after years of eye-rolling and "Oh Eddie"-ing Daphne gets to smash a vending machine in a hospital waiting room with a fire-extinguisher to show that she is upset...Yes, that does happen, and no, there are absolutely no consequences and everyone acts like it is a fairly normal reaction. Also, Daphne is mad because everyone who is with her is trying to have a normal conversation and cheer her up...This episode won the Writers Guild Award for Episodic Comedy, which is insane because this episode is terrible.

So yes, the man himself directed this, I guess Kelsey fancies himself television's Robert Redford or something, and it is very odd. There is a lot of Acting with a capital A and lots of strange closeups that linger just a little too long. I'm not sure if we are supposed to assume Niles is heavily medicated or something but he keeps rambling on about how "the hospital remembers" all of our big moments that occur within it. As he is being taken to surgery he has a bunch of hallucinations of past events that occured in the hospital- Frasier's son being born, Niles being born, his mother dying. It seems odd that all of these things happened in the same hospital corridor, especially since Frasier lived in Boston when Frederick was born and I'd think they'd keep the births and deaths in separate hallways, but no matter.

The Acting really starts when Niles is taken away and the rest of the gang gets to try out their "grief faces." The last two acts take place in one hospital waiting room, its like a horribly unfunny episode of Seinfeld. Its like watching a kid's play and you can tell everyone has forgotten their lines and you're just hoping so hard they'll skip ahead to the next scene and end everyone's suffering, but these are professional actors, and they didn't forget their lines, the writing is just awful.

Did you know that Kelsey Grammer was an Executive Producer for the UPN show "Grilfriends"? Including one episode titled: "What's Black-a-lacking?" He also produced an episode of "The Game" (whatever the fuck that is) called "Punk Ass Chauncey." Trying picturing Cpt. Emmy saying those titles. Think of his voice in your head and say: What's Black-a-lacking? its really pretty great.

9/10 If you ever get a chance to watch this, try thinking: Kelsey Grammer told them to do that, every time anyone does some stupid-ass Acting. it makes the whole experience worth it.

Quick Note

2009-07-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've been working on an epic motherfucker about the blue man group and its ties to "Frasier," so just give me a few days, but I had to share this: I went into the computer lab today and the kid who works there checking IDs whose face I absolutely hate for no good reason was sitting at his computer behind the desk eating Ritz crackers and watching episodes of "Frasier" on youtube!

What the fuck?

First of all, I didn't even know this was a possibility! But second and most important, seriously what the fuck? You have the entire world wide interweb at your fingertips and you are watching episodes of the emmy-award winning Frasier? And you're like 20 years old? Eating Ritz crackers. I'm honestly relieved because I was worried that I hated this fucking kid for no reason but now it turns out he's an absolute waste of space. Your job is to sit at a computer during summer-school and check the IDs of the ten people a day who visit your little corner, meaning you have about 7 hours of free time at a computer, during which obviously you are allowed to do whatever you want save jack-off to tentacle-rape Hentai (which is totally what this kid wishes he was doing)and you spend that time watching Kelsey Grammar?

Is this like when kids root for the same sports team as their dad? Maybe his dad was always distant and unloving, and the only time he really felt close to him was when they would sit and watch Must See Thursdays together. The only time his dad ever told him he loved him was when he remembered to tape the 1997 season finale when his dad had to work late.

PS: If I find out that the reason cracker-boy was watching this is because he has his own competing Frasier blog I'm going to bloody his flat-screen for him.

S1 E1/2 "The Good Son"/"Space Quest"

2009-03-26T20:22:00.001-07:00

Roz: Gary? I broke up with him three weeks ago... The sex was OK, but he was kind of limited... No, no, no, it wasn't that Gary was bad in bed. I mean, he knew where all the parts were. Unfortunately, most of them were his... Yes. Totally passionless. It was like he was thinking of someone else... I know I was... Somebody's here, I gotta go... All right, I'll talk to you later. Bye, Mom.

There it is, right up there; the genesis of the Roz is a slut/lush reference. Its pretty wonderful to behold-not only is Roz a slut, she’s uncomfortably open about it, talking to her mom about her sex-life right in front of Frasier. Who could have guessed such a bland bit would spawn so many years of obvious, repetitive humor? “Frasier” is sort of like the inverse of Zeppelin. While one Zep song could ration out to three or four songs for any other band, the “Frasier” team is able to take a gag that would be a one-off joke in any other comedy and turn it into a franchise; “You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song” indeed.

Honestly the Roz is a slut joke feels like a comedic oasis (or is it a mirage?) in the midst of the downer desert that makes up the inaugural episode and its counterpart. Its been a long time since I posted a review on this beast, even my silent partner thinks so, and that’s largely because these two eps are such a slog. To kick the series off Frasier has moved back to Seattle and is excited about starting a new life there for about 45 seconds until his burdensome handicapped father has to move in with him and essentially ruins his new life. Then an obnoxious Brit who claims to be psychic moves into his study and Roz tells him he’s bad at hosting a radio show. His brother Niles talks with a strange accent even more pompous than the tone he would eventually adopt, and rather than the playful rivalry the two characters eventually settled into, at the start Niles and Frasier are just petty and mean to one another. So, Frasier resents The Dad for encroaching on his personal space, The Dad resents Frasier for resenting him and I’m assuming all of the actors resent The Dad’s Dog for getting all of the laughs.

All of the humor in “The Good Son” and “Space Quest” comes from, or is supposed to come from, shots of the dog staring cockeyed at Frasier or The Dad coming really close to calling his sons faggots but then stopping himself at the precipice. Most episodes of “Frasier” contain at least one embarrassing moment of genuine laughter, or at least knowing nods at a joke that almost hits the mark, but these two gems don’t have a whiff of comedy. Both of them are “Frasier learns a lesson” episodes and each one has the same lesson; there are no subplots, no “beautiful” women, absolutely no fucking zany farces which should be fucking illegal for two “Frasier” episodes in a row. There aren’t even any asinine misunderstandings! Just long-winded over-the-top speeches and histrionic fights between Fras and The Dad-surprise!-a three-camera, laugh tracked sitcom is not the ideal place to explore a strained embittered father-son relationship. This shit had me wishing for a PNDM episode, and I hate those!

“Space Quest” is essentially a remake of “The Good Son,” I guess at this point the machine that produced “Frasier” episodes was just a copier. I’ll admit this is a pretty bold move for a brand new show, maybe it was originally planned as a sort of experiment, like Van Sant’s “Psycho,” just remaking the same script every week to see what different directors would do with the same material. Well…it is a failure. Kelsey Grammar as a dramatic actor was difficult enough to swallow the first time around.

7/10-this is as bad as mediocre can get, I’m shocked that they were able to turn this into a long-running show, it feels like “Ordinary People” in 22-minute increments, starring David Hyde Pierce…

S9 E2 "Don Juan In Hell Pt. 2"

2009-01-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

Roz: I was never his lady.
Kirby: Damn, baby, that’s cold!
Kristi: She’s old enough to be your mother, practically.
Roz: Damn, baby, now that’s cold!

Part 1 of this two-piece was the first ep to air after creator David Angell died in the 9/11 (never forget) attacks. I used to believe in that 9/11 (never forget) inside job conspiracy ish, but there is no way that David Angell would not have gotten a call before he went to work if that shit was true, for Frasier to have won so many awards motherfucker had to be connected, and you know Cheney and Wolfowitz bro-down on some Frasier whenever they’re holed up in Dick’s secret lair. I guess we really should be shelling Afghani villages and raiding Iraqi hospitals, take that Truthers! In dying, David Angell has restored my faith in the US Government. Never forget.

I have no idea what happened in part 1, I can’t imagine it matters. Part 2 opens with Frasier in an ethical dilemma, a woman he secretly lusts after asks him advice when her ex-husband comes back into her life. Frasier is torn, he wants to date the woman but can see that she still has feelings for her husband. There shouldn’t really be an issue, damey looks like a mom with a meth-habit (or, looks like any mom from Nebrahoma) which is to say: wide, flat ass, Chicago-titties, and a ruined face, and she’s a total wet-blanket with a fucking kid, the only question should be whether or not Frasier pisses in her stairwell as he sneaks out. He ends up doing the right thing and counseling her to get back with her husband, then goes home pouting to find Niles, Daphne, The Dad and whatever old cooz The Dad’s truthing his bed with having deep pretzel time. Predictably Frasier is totally disgusted by their disgusting coupling (or, pair-bonding) and decides to take a drive to clear his head and think about his relationship issues.

Finally this dud of a plot gets out of the way so we can enjoy some of the best television ever. While Frasier drives out to a cabin that he (apparently) owns in the woods he hallucinates the presence of his ex-wife Lilith, Diane (from Cheers), and his first wife (what?) who is a ridiculous hippie stereotype complete with Indian feathers and a toy guitar. He talks to them (himself) about his relationship troubles and each figment of Frasier’s imagination present different theories about why he sabotages himself when it comes to love. It’s pretty amazing that this was actually on TV, and that everyone’s dads watched it and accepted it as regular old-person entertainment considering that this behavior is absolutely insane.

When they get to the cabin Frasier’s dead mother (her name is Hester Crane) shows up and Lilith makes a joke about how Frasier wants to juice his mom, the laugh track finds this hilarious, and I bet your parents laughed too. Talk about subversive. At some point the women are all arguing with each other and Frasier’s mom claims that Frasier is “making” them fight so as to avoid working out his women-issues, thinking about this makes my head hurt: Frasier is being haunted by vivid hallucinations who he cannot stop from talking or from criticizing him and who he cannot make go away, but he is able to compel them to argue with each other so as to avoid discussing his relationship troubles, a subject these very unreal people are hell-bent on talking about. After the women stop arguing Frasier tries to run away but is confronted at the front door with a hallucination of every woman he has ever dated which is a surprisingly large amount of women who are all dressed the same. It is finally concluded that Frasier always fails at love because he can’t let go of his idealized memories of the women he once loved. A pretty simple conclusion that likely could have been reached without going absolutely crazy.

This is the easiest rating I’ve ever had to give, not only is there a Roz is a slut joke, there is a Roz is old joke which is a new wrinkle (no pun intended), and Frasier, the psychiatrist, works out his problems by utilizing a usually dormant multiple-personality disorder: A+.

Frasier Night

2008-12-17T00:44:00.000-08:00

S3 E6 “Sleeping with the Enemy”/ S3 E7 “The Adventures of Bad Boy and Dirty Girl”

Kate: Why are you gunning for me?
Frasier: Gunning? For you? This isn't about you; it's about what you're doing to those people. It's the shame of Seattle.
Kate: No, no. This is about your ego, which is the size of Seattle!
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Brian Turner: He and I are going to go back and watch Frasier at my place after this.
Various People at the Bar: Oh…okay.

A few weeks ago I, and the man who inspires me (some would perhaps call him my muse) had a Frasier night. This consisted entirely of drinking heavily at a bar while occasionally mentioning Frasier, then going back to Mr. Turner’s apartment and drinking heavily there while actually watching Frasier. As you might guess I don’t remember a lot of these episodes, but thanks to the still inexplicable existence of individual Wikipedia entries for every single Frasier episode ever I am able to perform this valuable service, in spite of the consumption of an unhealthy amount of Malort and PBR. (Speaking of the Frasier Wikipedia entries I have a list of dream features I would like to share with you: the first is an interview with the lonely soul who created each Wikipedia page for the Frasier eps because you know there is only one fucker on the whole interweb actually invested that much in middling format comedy and with that much time on his or her hands and I am certain that this person would be fucking advanced, second is a list of all of the reasons that people like Frasier (number one being that it is on at the same time that they happen to want to watch TV), third is a new segment in which I review every episode of the show Jesus Saves to the Uttermost on the Catholic station as a spin-off, in an attempt to appeal to our more devout readers.)

Perhaps because I’ve been watching the papist channel more often (especially that show with the pirate nun) or because, being an old-dad himself, God loves Frasier, the heavens smiled upon us and presented the only Frasier two-parter I have ever seen. The best thing about this duo of episodes is that the “To be Continued” was totally superfluous as there were absolutely no questions left unanswered or problems left unresolved by the ending of the first episode. The worst part is that the fucker doesn’t fit nicely into any of the already stated templates, it flirts with every single one but never settles, the damned subplots don’t even fit the templates for Christ’s sake, and I have a feeling that is why the whole thing ends up being such a disappointment.

The night started at The Green Mill in Uptown, it was mostly empty as it was 6:30 on a Wednesday, but there was an old fat lady who told me that the intersection of Woodward and Warren is not in Detroit and is “the suburbs,” I think she was missing a bunch of teeth but she may have just smelled bad. There was also a pseudo-biker who dressed like the Indian from the Village People but fat and with real bear-teeth hanging from his neck, and a sailing enthusiast Registered Nurse who told me her boyfriend had six-pack abs, and, briefly, a 30’s-ish couple that looked like they had stepped out of a Target commercial. Turner told me about the religion he followed based around an omniscient squid and the bartender kept giving us free shots of Malort because no one wants that shit, but she wouldn’t drink any with us because she was on antibiotics. As is appropriate we missed the first few minutes of the episode itself, but if you know how inconsequential the first few minutes are to a regular episode you can imagine how unimportant they are in a two-parter.

Even with the amount of drinks I had consumed, it was clear they were really stretching the “beautiful” definition in this piece. Mercedes Ruehl plays the new hard ass boss at the radio station and she refuses to give the non on-air talent their scheduled raise. As is to be expected this episode of Frasier deals with class warfare and also as is expected, the needs and rights of the working class are completely marginalized and insulted. Frasier is elected spokesperson for the low-wage workers because, I guess, all we Proles need is some wealthy intellectual white to speak for us. While the workers wait with baited breath outside of the boss’ door to find out if they will be paid fairly for the work they’ve done, the matter of actual importance is the tawdry love affair Frasier cultivates with their boss behind the closed door, while the working-class stands dumbly by, the bourgeousie are holed up in their offices, fucking each other. By the end of the first episode, Frasier and the boss have fucked, and the workers have gotten their raise, no one has discovered the pair fornicating and the boss and Frasier have agreed not to see each other romantically. Everything is resolved…to be continued.

In the second half, Frasier gets in Ms. Boss’ guts in the radio booth and (surprise!) they bump the on-air button and their session is broadcast to all of Seattle, causing Niles to crash his car. Then Ms. Boss comes by Frasier’s apartment building to break it all of and they end up being trapped in an elevator together and it seems like they will screw again and get caught and thus be exposed, instead they do not have sex, they do not get caught, and they are not exposed. Then the episode ends. The ending of the second half of this two-part storyline is much less satisfying and complete than the ending of the first half. My hypothesis is that someone messed up plugging the information into the template and things got out of order and since Frasier is directed by a computer, no one noticed until it was too late.

The only interesting thing about the second part is the totally odd concept of arousal and sexuality presented in it. By the end of the episode Frasier and Ms. Boss have decided to not pursue a relationship, they do not even seem attracted to each other. It is not the appeal of forbidden love or the harboring of lingering attraction that draws them to each other, rather it is just certain words or images which, if ever invoked drive them to arousal. The two are both like Pavlov’s dog, at the mere mention of “bad boy,” or at the smell of musk oil, or the viewing of a (barely) erotic painting they lunge for one another, displaying no sort of human emotion or reaction I have ever witnessed or felt, it is probably the worst depiction of lust ever attempted.

The subplot does center around the dad possibly getting his dick wet in some even older woman and there is a plethora of Roz is a slut jokes, but that’s where the goodness ends. If you’re going to have a two-part episode you should still make it so we only have to hear Kelsey Grammer sing that song at the end one time…7/10

S1 E6 "The Crucible"

2008-11-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

Frasier: I hate lawyers.
Niles: Oh, me too, but they make wonderful patients. They have excellent health insurance, and they never get better

That’s right, there’s a lawyer joke in this one. Just when I wonder if my life could get better, two pinnacles of terrible humor collide in one magnificent moment…if I wasn’t such a weirdo I might take that as a bad sign but come on, this shit is almost too good to be true. Moving on…

‘The Crucible” is a “Frasier learns a lesson” episode (although Niles seems to learn the exact opposite lesson so I’m not sure what to make of it-also some parts of the lesson are just entirely inaccurate and asinine which makes me even more confused-maybe this is more of a “Frasier and Niles think various stupid things about the same topic” episode, but that isn’t one of the templates so whatever) this is also an E&J fueled review so please excuse the digressions.

It is a bit refreshing to be viewing some classic Frasier episodes-let’s just say that later Frasier makes early Frasier seem like mid-run Seinfeld. In the new millennium episodes the high-brow personae of the Crane brothers is just a rumor typified only by their inability to ride a bicycle and their enjoyment of sherry in the afternoon, but in the early going their upper crust identity is an intrinsic element of the show. For instance, the entire plot of this episode centers around a painting by a woman whom Frasier describes as the pre-eminent neophobic artist in the country or something like that which is fucking amazing-this needs to be an art classification I know that the idea of artists only referencing and existing within older types of art is not new at all (no pun intended) but it should be referred to as neophobia from here on out.

Anyway, the painting is not actually done by this neophobic artist but is in fact a forgery. Upon learning of the forgery Frasier attempts to get his money back and is rebuffed; he is then informed by his father that the police would not be at all interested in investigating the faking of a high-priced piece of art. He is also told by Niles that going on his show and telling people the truth about the forgery and the gallery that tricked him would amount to slander. In spite of the fact that both of these claims are absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical Frasier learns a valuable lesson from them: life isn’t fair and the institutions set up to help us can’t always do so…He then attempts to throw a brick through the gallery’s window while wearing a suit but Niles catches him (in the only Frasier scene I have ever seen depicting the outside, save for Frasier's ludicrous looking balcony) and tells him that if he acts like a barbarian he will become one, which is a pretty faggy lesson to learn, but then Niles throws the brick through the window because everyone saw him naked in high school. It’s weird.

This should be the time when I give you my rating but I’ve got a bit more to say because I think it should be said: the originally planned series finale my esteemed partner cited in his initial review, he has most of the facts straight but as usual has the context all wrong. The original finale was not some working class salvo but a typical half-hearted attempt from the hackneyed writer Lori Kirkland Baker to shoe-horn actual situational comedy into the Frasier template, where it simply does not belong. The two parter, actually titled "This is Property," was at best a failed attempt at a dramatic ending, at worst it was Baker’s disgusting attempt to poke fun at the anarchist protests in Seattle 1999, no laughing matter I assure you. I would love to use this space to discuss the fact that Alicia Keys self-identifies as an anarchist, and I believe has some tour dates scheduled with Howard Zinn but I'm running out of time. More on the original script, and Alicia "Anarchy" Keys next week when I review the two-part series finale.

The lesson is amazingly stupid and they do make the streets of Seattle look like a set from an off-Broadway musical but the subplot is just Niles’ bizarre Anglophobic skirt-chasing and Roz only gets called a lush one-time. It is pretty fitting that this show is a "reference" to the Arthur Miller play "The Crucible" only in that it is called "The Crucible" and has no other similarities, thematically or otherwise, to Miller's piece, somehow that is just so Frasier.

79/100, better than that '04 shit, but in all the wrong ways.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/15/aliciakeys.urban

S8 E3 “The Bad Son”

2008-11-18T12:49:00.000-08:00

This was a halfway tolerable one—though they’re all mostly tolerable, as that’s the very nature of this middle-of-the-bell-curve mediocrity—but let me offer two pieces of perspective: (a) I was fighting some serious jet lag when I switched this on, and thus may have been slightly delirious, and (b) the only thing else I had watched in the previous, oh, 96 hours was a mid-flight double-header of Get Smart and The Devil Wears Prada, with a random episode of “How I Met Your Mother” sandwiched in between. Get stranded in that ocean of sheer humorlessness and you too would welcome Kelsey’s manic mugging like a rescue chopper in shark infested waters.

“The Bad Son,” whose title, I’m told, is a play on series pilot “The Good Son,” is a combo episode. In other words, it combines all three of the Frasier templates into one triple-headed hydra monster of mediocrity. It begins with Dr. Crane on the bus, a first for him and the series, and something of a missed opportunity; I keep waiting and waiting for an episode where the good doctor patronizes some under-privileged youth and then shortly gets his ass handed to him. (Season Six cliffhanger?) Anyway, Frasier spots a beautiful woman on the bus—and this one was genuinely pretty foxy (and British too!) though I preferred her curvy brunette friend—eavesdrops on her conversation, and manages to catch her name and business. Seven minutes later he’s dragging his father into the retirement home she works at, stroking his head and pretending he’s chronically senile, a amazing slight of dignity that Dad shrugs off as business-as-usual from his totally deplorable offspring. The tables seem set for a Frasier Embarrasses Himself In Front of a Beautiful Woman climax, but then, thanks to some masterful plot wrangling by secret-weapon writer Rob Hanning, it takes a dramatic left turn into Frasier Learns A Lesson land. (Apparently, Dad does want to move into the home, and that makes Frasier sad. Awww.)

The B-plot is a Wacky But Easy To Understand Farce wherein Niles and Daphne share a romantic dinner on the roof of Frasier’s apartment, try out prospective terms of endearment, and then get locked out, with Daphne stuck on the roof and Niles caught in the dark stairway leading up to it—what is this, “Mad About You?” It’s both amusing and a little nauseating watching these two awkwardly feign romantic interest in each other, scrunching their faces into artificial expressions of affection, wincing through their contrived scenes together and choking down the bile in their mouths. A whole subplot with just them is a bit insufferable, and the episode literally ends with a sappy slow zoom on Niles’ face as he thinks about how much he loves his Brit Twit of a girlfriend. Still, physically separating the two is a novel solution to their complete and utter lack of chemistry. It’s apparently easier for D.H. Pierce to project his longing into empty darkness then it is for to make mooneyes with his “beloved,” probably because, with a wall of concrete between them, that little smitten smile can be for whoever (‘s penis) he really fancies.

I do like episodes where the Dad seems five seconds away from screaming “My sons are a couple of goddamn queers!” Also, I found the bus scene surprisingly convincing, at least from a technical standpoint—“are they really shooting on an actual moving bus?” I pondered for a moment—but that, again, may have been the jetlag speaking. In fact, it almost surely was.

As any true Frasier connoisseur knows, the value of a given episode does not and cannot really hinge on how often you actually laugh. That being said, I award this particular saga a whopping (3) Genuine Laughs. They are as follows: (1) Frasier spots a billboard of himself, with a graffiti mustache crudely drawn on, and remarks: “Dammit, and after I specifically asked people not to do that on my show!” A cheap laugh, I’ll grant you, but you take em’ where you can get em’ with this series. (2) Frasier makes mention of his father tricking Niles and he into going to summer camp to earn their “Opera badges.” (3) Trapped between doors, Daphne says to Niles: “At least that spider is gone,” to which Niles glances nervously up at the wall and bellows “He’s not in his corner! He’s not in his corner!” Nothing worse than snorting in genuine amusement at a Frasier gag. Just embarrassing.

# of Roz-is-a-slut-or-a-lush references: 1
(Frasier: “She’s a complete stranger.” Roz: “You know her name and where she works. That’s more than I usually have before diving in.” Oh, Roz, you’re such a slut!

S11 E17 "Coots and Ladders"

2008-11-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

Opal: The last time I tried, I fell off the ladder, and I lay on my back like…
Frasier: Like a helpless turtle?
Opal: No, like a half hour till the ambulance came.

This is Heidi Perlman penned so you know it’s a fucking gem. Its basically Frasier’s Rashomon episode, in which we are given two differing versions, Niles’ and Frasier’s, of an event via flashback.

This is an old cooz heavy episode centering around Frasier’s 83 year old, sexually active, neighbor and featuring a cameo by Helen Mirren. It also has an old woman who fantasizes about fucking Harry Truman while sleeping on top of Niles’ coat. I don’t want to say this is the most sophisticated 22 minutes of television ever but not only is it the Rashomon episode, it is also the Crime and Punishment ep- as Frasier takes to robbing an old woman for no reason other than that he can (it even has him holding a stone bust menacingly, maybe the critics are right and this is the smartest show ever…), and also because he is jealous or sad or something about Niles and The Dad having totally inexplicable marriages to totally unappealing women. Oh yeah, The Dad and that tall chick from Just Shoot Me are married now or engaged or something, it’s possible that old balls proposed to her after spackling her while Frasier watched-or listened or whatever- but I don’t know-I only missed a few episodes and these bidges are already hitched.

This is an “elaborate but easy to understand farce” episode that centers around Niles and Frasier pretending to participate in an old cooz’s surprise party so they can return her bronze-medal before she is supposed to have her picture taken with it; it ends with Frasier carrying Niles out on his shoulders…Yeah, this shit is advanced. Quite literally nothing funny occurs in this entire episode, unless you count the sight of Kelsey Grammer smashing a car’s windshield with a hammer as funny, which I guess I do, so one funny thing happens in this episode.

The subplot is just Niles, tall chick from Just Shoot Me, The Dad, and preggers teaching Frasier a lesson about being happy and how happiness comes when you least expect it or something, the fact that Frasier is in the subplot feels like cheating. At the end of the episode The Dad keeps trying to get Frasier to go into his bedroom and make the tall chick from Just Shoot Me think it’s him (The Dad) because “she can’t see a thing without her contacts,” The Dad even suggests Frasier put on his robe and Aqua Velva so as to trick the tall chick from Just Shoot Me into letting him into bed with her. I really have no idea what we are supposed to think about all this.

This installment has all of the Perlman staples: no jokes, an elaborate but easy to understand farce, Frasier gesturing randomly-but it also has too much Daphne and Niles time and the tall chick from Just Shoot Me has worn out her fucking welcome-things were so much more fun when The Dad had jungle fever and Daphne’s klepto-mother was chasing him around…8 out of 10.

S11 E6 "I'm Listening"

2008-11-10T22:25:00.000-08:00

Martin: D'you want a drink?
Ronee: Oh, I’d better not; I’m working. Just a beer.

As close to classic as you can get with PNDM (Post Niles-Daphne Marriage) Frasier, this episode features a guest spot from the tall chick from Just Shoot Me (if only we could’ve had the brother from Everybody Loves Raymond or a Matt Le Blanc cameo, this ish coulda been major label…). She is dating The Dad in the creepiest hookup since Mini-me tagged that real-sized girl.

There isn’t a subplot, or I can’t remember it if there is, Roz shows up for a second but no one calls her a slut or a lush so it doesn’t really count (if I were a more boring person I might make an issue of the fact that of the two female leads one is essentially a helper-monkey with a gross accent and the other is just a drunken whore who is somehow also a nag…but I guess I’ll just leave that to Alex, our resident bore), the episode is mercifully free of pregnant Daphne.

This is a “Frasier learns a lesson” episode but to make up for the missing subplot the show also includes 3 elaborate but easy to understand farces (!)-including a farce within a farce in which Roz pretends Frasier’s dad is her dad while Frasier’s dad pretends Roz is his g/f to make the tall chick from Just Shoot Me jealous (this is all much simpler and less interesting than it sounds). Also, Frasier keeps eavesdropping and for some reason when he eavesdrops he gesticulates wildly.

Of course Frasier does eventually learn his lesson-Don’t eavesdrop!-when he contrives to find himself hiding in the tall chick from Just Shoot Me’s car and is consequently forced to listen to his dad make it rain on her rather than reveal himself and confirm that he is a compulsive eavesdropper.

So…this episode involves Frasier hiding behind a counter crouching on the ground and inexplicably waving his arms about, no pregnant Brits, and the suggestion of the white-haired cripple moistening some box in a classic convertible while his son listens from just inches away…5 of 5 stars, don’t be stupid.

A SECOND OPINION: S11 E5: "The Placeholder"

2008-11-05T20:57:00.000-08:00

S11 E5 “The Placeholder”

Dorothy Parker once wrote, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” She might well have been writing of the Brothers Crane. The best episodes of Frasier—the ones that plumb the hollow heart of high society, the sickening rot at the center of our fat and complacent bourgeoisie—recognize that the titular doctor, his persnickety brother, and the rest of that dead-eyed extended family are figures to be pitied, scorned, and eventually destroyed by the less fortunate souls they daintily (and obliviously) tread upon. No small wonder that the series was originally to end with Seattle consumed by violent labor riots, the family trapped by raging fires within Frasier’s ivory-tower radio-booth, the good doctor taking to the airwaves to futilely plead for a rescue party that would never arrive. (NBC got cold feet and the unspeakably bleak but amusingly titled “I’m Not Listening” never aired. Pity.)

Lori Kirkland Baker was one of the brainchilds of that fiery, open-ended downer of a finale. Her fiercely feminine voice—almost maternal in its rage, protective of the real heroes of Frasier, the marginalized, working-class stiffs the series dedicates its shrieking outrage to—informs this gem from Season 11. Like some lost collaboration between Todd Solondz, Bret Easton Ellis, and Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Placeholder” exposes Frasier as the callous, selfish, hedonistic monster that society has made of him, the rampaging id incarnate. His family, meanwhile, are simply ignorant racists, children of a post-colonial Western world, wracked with liberal guilt but devoid of any traces of genuine empathy or self-reflection.

Frasier spends the better part of the episode—by which I mean the second half, so laceratingly honest that seeing the first seems both unnecessary and too demanding to the fragile human spirit—suffering through a blind date with a socially-awkward (forgivable) and plainly Jewish (unforgivable) stranger. (The poor girl is played by Julia Sweeney, who proves herself as adept at satirical culture clash as she was at smashing gender-bender taboos on SNL.) But when some hot piece of ass catches his eye, alluring him with her delicate passiveness and Aryan good looks, Frasier crudely attempts to ditch his Hebrew dud and seduce himself a new Anonymous Fuck Puppet.

It’s a cruelly effective gag, as damning in its critique of gender politics as a Neil LaBute one act, but it pales in comparison to the B storyline. Here, an Eastern European maid—played, in a sly nod to Baker’s humanistic forbearers, by a distant relative of Dostoevsky—is suspected of stealing from Niles and Daphne. Any episode featuring that ersatz romance, with its winking nod to repressed homosexuality in the American elite and its metaphoric, crackled-mirror reflection of U.S.-British relations, is bound to be a keeper. But “The Placeholder” cuts deeper, initially inviting us to denounce the Crane Couple for their foolish assumptions and prejudices, to self-righteously revel in their inevitable comeuppance. Then, just as we’re ready to wag our fingers in scorn at them—Daphne’s fumbling attempts at securing a confession have a Hitchcockian suspense to them—the episode seduces us into finally believing that maybe this penniless wage slave really is guilty. But wait! A last reversal, suggesting the bastard love child of a Michael Haneke prank and a didactic Lars Von Trier lecture, pulls the rug out from under us yet again. Is the joke now on the audience, too? Are we as guilty of stereotyping and unwarranted assumptions as Niles and Daphne? Like a corrective to Paul Haggis’ spot-a-racist hectoring, “The Placeholder” makes us question not just our own fears and biases, but our readiness to deflect them upon others to ease our aching cultural consciences. “They blunder, therefore we are,” asserts Baker. Not even a too-convenient MacGuffin—a videotape that proves handy as both Daphne’s phony coercion tool and the Dues Ex Machina expose of the real culprit behind the thefts—can dull the edge of this biting comedy of (t)errors. Imagine how profound it would be if seen in its entirety. A

Number of Roz-is-a-slut-or-lush references in the second half: 0
Number of Roz-is-a-slut-or-lush references in the first half: 3 (presumably)

S11 E5 "The Placeholder"

2008-11-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Frasier: I have standards. Haven’t you ever heard of waiting for Miss Right?
Roz: Yeah, well Miss Right has standards too, and she’s not looking to meet Mr Mothball.

I only watched half of this epic but that’s never really a problem with Frasier. It’s hard to guess what could have possibly transpired in the first 15 minutes as the plot seemed to be just kicking in when I turned this ish on at 11:17.
There are 3 and a half templates for a Frasier episode; I picture the writers just plugging the names and locations into an already programmed outline, like making your resume with Microsoft Word. The templates are: Frasier learns a lesson, Frasier embarrasses himself in front of a “beautiful” woman, an elaborate but easy to understand farce, or; the half-template; Frasier embarrasses himself in front of a “beautiful” woman and subsequently learns a lesson. “Beautiful” is in quotations because beautiful is a term widely used but totally meaningless in Frasier-world. Sometimes, as in this episode, the “beautiful” woman is legitimately striking, but most of the time “beautiful,” to Frasier, means simply a thin woman with long hair.
The construction of an episode of Frasier is much simpler than the concept of beauty: if Frasier is involved in one the template then the subplot is the other principles in one of the other templates, ie; if Frasier and Niles are occupied with Frasier learning a lesson, then Daphne and The Dad will participate in an elaborate but easy to understand farce-the other characters are almost always perpetrating an elaborate but easy to understand farce although occasionally Niles learns a lesson or The Dad embarrasses himself in front of a “beautiful” woman (stretching the term even further in the process). Daphne never does anything, her and the dog serve the same basic function which is to be obnoxious in a slightly amusing way and to occasionally make Frasier sigh in exasperation.
In this episode Frasier embarrasses himself in front of a beautiful woman, because, even though he spends a good amount of his time lying to women (in a way we can all relate to humorously) he is terrible at it. Frasier so embarrasses himself that the beautiful woman decides to leave Seattle forever which seems an odd reaction to someone who you’ve never met before making a fool of himself.
Since Frasier is embarrassing himself Niles, Daphne and The Dad are involved in an elaborate but easy to understand farce (they are also kind of learning a lesson, even Daphne! but it’s hard to tell what the lesson is, it may be: don’t hate eastern Europeans but it also may be: don’t assume poor people are all thieves) in which they try to trick the new maid into admitting she is stealing and end up stumbling across an amazing videotape of Daphne’s birthday party (who videotapes a birthday party for an adult?) that reveals Daphne’s meddling mother to be the actual thief!
The whole thing is quite a disappointment. The depiction of Frasier’s date with Julia Sweeney (Pat of It’s Pat, and the eponymous placeholder) is effectively horrible but his moment of embarrassment is too brief and awkwardly staged. It is void even of any attempts at humor, opting for Kelsey Grammer’s odd mumbling and antic gesturing instead of actual jokes. The farce, while quite easy to understand, is not actually elaborate and is resolved happily in less than 5 minutes, 2 of which are spent with a static shot of people watching a television and narrating the action of a tape we, the audience, are never allowed to see.
Still, the love-interest was a legitimate dime and I only had to watch half of the episode so…C+

F is for Frasier

2008-11-05T12:04:00.000-08:00

The existence of this blog can be traced to one incredible man...Brian Turner. If it werent for my manager's bizarre propensity for describing in awful detail the plot points of Frasier, for relating line by line the utterly unhumorous farces, or for enumerating every instance of a cameo from a former Cheers cast member this blog would never have come to be. But don't let the blog's frivoulous genesis fool you, Frasier is a fascinating topic. It is the most critically lauded and one of the most popular shows in the history of television and this is nearly unfathomable. It is also your dad's favorite show, which makes a lot more sense...this is format entertainment, which doesn't make it unique at all but it does make it worth exploring, essentially Frasier is what TV execs think the majority of us want to see without any unnecessary trappings of artistry or originality. If such a thing is possible Frasier is the height of mediocrity...it is also legitimately next level.

We have a rule at my house-if Frasier is on, you have to watch it so this blog will be reviews of whatever random episodes are on the box when my roommate Alex or I are at the crib and watching TV, no idea when that fool is going to start contributing on the regular.

The quotes featured at the top of each review are from the wikipedia page of that particular episode so they are the lines some Frasier fan found the funniest...keep that in mind.

So the point of this is to explore mediocrity, the point is to watch Frasier and tell the world about it, mainly the point is to amuse.

To paraphrase Young Martian-Tha Frasier Blog, welcome-have fun. Ya dig?