Can Frasier And Niles Get On The Same Page?

Dave: [0:17] This is the Extra Extra Hot Great Podcast. Episode 311, our first installment of three of these for 2025. I am canine headphones holder David T. Cole, and I'm here with outrageous minibar bill Sarah D. Bunting. Sarah: [0:39] You're an incomplete thought. Dave: [0:41] And Lennon's sister Tara Ariano. Tara: [0:43] That reference is from the friggin' moon. Welcome to a bonus extra, extra hot great. This is the first, as Dave said, of our three of these miniseries for 2025. Thank you for being here. We're delighted to have you. It's my turn to bring you through three of these. And I went real granular. This year, you're going to be hearing every 12 weeks or so about three sitcom episodes from the 90s in which a broadcaster writes a book or tries to. And no, I did not include the failed attempts just to lord it over these fictional men that And I am the published author of three half books. We are starting with Frasier, season one, episode 22, author, author. I realize this is very close to the last Frasier conversation we had in the Holiday Canon episode, but it's up first in chronological order. So sorry, yell it, history, not me. This was written by Don Siegel and Jerry Perzigian. Funny that this particular episode came from a writing team, by the way. And directed by living legend James Burroughs. It originally aired May 5th, 1994, and I will go through the plot. You can break in where you need to. I'll have discussion points at the end. Tara: [2:02] The episode only has one plot line. It kicks off about a minute into the cold open as a flustered Niles joins Frazier at Cafe Nervosa. Niles has sold a book pitch to a local publisher that he and or they subsequently found out had been done. They gave him a chance to salvage the deal by coming up with something else, but after two extensions, he still hasn't, and he doesn't know what he's going to tell his publisher. Sam Tanaka when he arrives. And it turns out Tanaka, played in a crossover event with our 2023 three of these series by Mako. Tara: [2:35] Is a fan of Frazier's, never connected that he and Niles were related, and pitches them on writing a book together about sibling relationships. Niles claims that's what they were about to pitch him, and everyone's happy, except Frazier, or at least at first, clip two. I know it's asking a big favor, and I know you're busy, but, I just want you to know that all my life I have dreamed. Sarah: [2:56] Could go into a library and go to the card catalog and see my name under mental illness. The day I. Tara: [3:46] All right, I'll do it. Yes! Frazier and Niles reconvene later at Frazier's place to get started. When they aren't immediately inspired, Frazier suggests using the next day's radio show to solicit sibling stories from his listeners. Niles calls this borderline sleazy and immediately agrees, so we get this the following day, clip three. Our topic today is siblings. What makes you love. Tara: [4:23] Adulthood, or they could be things that are going on right now. Tara: [4:29] At the end of the episode, Tanaka calls more excited about the project than ever. Niles lies that they already have a few chapters done, which is great news since Tanaka says that Reader's Digest is interested in the serialization rights. Tara: [4:43] Backtracking ensues, but Tanaka says they have until Friday to polish up what they have. Fraser remembers that when the Gershwins were on deadline, they used to post up in a hotel room to minimize distractions, and so do the cranes. The change of venue doesn't immediately spark either creativity or collaboration, as we hear in clip four. All we need is a good opening sentence. Something that will smack. Tara: [6:01] My fingers are poised over the keys. Time passes without Frasier coming up with anything until clip five. Oh, all right, all right. Put this down. The key to a good. Tara: [6:58] To the iced tea? I finished that, too. Tara: [7:02] It's a bad opening sentence, but Fraser's version is better. Sorry. More time passes. Tara: [7:08] The whole night, in fact, because after Fraser finishes drinking the minibar, he opens the curtains and sees that the sun has come up. It's Friday, and they have nothing to send to Tanaka. Insults and recriminations start to fly, clip six. Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised if you'd give up so easily. It's not your dream, after all. Tara: [8:33] You calling spindly, fat face? You, spindly. Fat face. Spindly. Fat face. A physical fight starts with an aggressive chest hair plucking and escalates to Frasier looming over Niles on the bed, clip seven. My God, I'm having a flashback! You're climbing in my crib and. Dave: [8:50] Jumping on me! You stole my mommy! Tara: [8:56] After Frasier has fled, Niles stops by his place. The brothers still aren't speaking and glare at each other across the living room before clip 8. Dad, I would like you to convey a message from me to Frasier. What makes you think I know where he is? Low-key maybe my favorite joke in the episode yeah niles wants fraser's half of the hotel bill but will only take cash not a check he knows fraser has trouble writing things sick of their shit marty tells them the story of his old partner gus and how they fell out after a long stakeout gus requested a transfer and marty was fine with it until gus got stabbed to death three months later before they could make peace. As Niles and Frasier, moved by the story, make up, Marty finds Daphne sniffling in the kitchen, clip nine. I just keep thinking about poor Gus. It must be so hard on, least there's one good writer in this family. And that's the episode, so let's dig into it a little. Viewers at this point, New Fraser, the character, of course, from Cheers. But we're still getting to know both Niles and how the two of them relate. And this comes quite early in the show's run, but I feel like it wouldn't have been out of place in the last season either. It's kind of incredible to me what a handle everybody involved has on these characters and their relationship with each other. What did you guys think? Dave? Dave: [10:25] Yeah, I was surprised when I double-checked what it was, and it was like 22nd episode of the series. Tara: [10:31] Yeah. Dave: [10:31] That for that reason, like it felt like even though they have unresolved issues, the way in which they were dealing with each other felt very natural and very comedically smooth. That one line where they are about to run into that trope of tell X, I said Y. Oh, yeah. Well, tell him I said this and back and forth through third party is short circuited immediately. But what makes you think I know where he is was really funny and really smart. I love it when they do that. Because, you know, Frasier both embraces a lot of tropes. I'm pretty sure they've done boss comes to dinner in some form or another. But, you know, they're also playing with the format as well. And that one line reading like made the whole episode for me. I thought it was really great. And again, stealth MVP, Marty Crane, again, for me. It feels very polished. Of course, the creative team has the benefit of having done Cheers for a million years beforehand. So obviously, they know how things are supposed to work rhythmically. But to get the cast that solidifies so early and the game speaks of what a quality show it is. Tara: [11:40] Sarah. Sarah: [11:41] Yeah, and that was true even earlier in this first season because we on our couch went straight from end of Cheers to beginning of Frasier. They do have that lead from Cheers, but then to sort of drop the character in a different style of comedy, like this is much more sort of like farce based, I would say. Sarah: [12:04] Then just a straight-ahead sitcom. And then you also have to populate the world with characters that we were given to understand in the parent show were dead or didn't exist. I was always impressed by the speed with which they got up to speed. Like traditional, this is how we understand the characters. It took like 10 minutes in the pilot. I also like that, as Dave mentioned, they know when to... I mean, it is trope-y. Like, you know, there's only so many funny 22-minute stories, but they know when to take a different route to the end or exploit your understanding of tropes and invert them. And they often use Marty to do that. And I miss John Mahoney every time I see an episode of Frasier. He was so good and had such fun with it. Stealth MVP for sure. But there are some real classic line deliveries in this one that there's nothing recognizable to me about co-writing things in here. Thank you for saying that. Sarah: [13:12] I just work with organized, friendly Sagittarians, and we just don't have these fucking issues. I don't know. And I also don't have a same-sex sibling, so it's different. I don't recognize this from working with my own brother, but I do feel like I often complain in a variety of genres that TV writers don't understand having siblings or being adult siblings or being children. It's like a room full of onlys that don't get it. And that is never true of Frasier and my husband, too. Does have a brother pretty close in age and has never sort of been like, this isn't what it's like. The farce is really well done always, but there is also a kernel of authenticity to these episodes where they're in conflict, which is not often, but it's funny. Dave: [14:10] One of the things that speaks to that that I really enjoyed, another great Marty moment, is early on in the creative process for the book, the brothers Crane decide that they will use themselves as the backbone of what they're writing, So they asked their father, like, give us some stories from our youth that really nutshell what being two brothers is all about. And he's like, starts off as like, well, had to be back at that camp. It was by that lake. What was that lake's name? And he like goes off trying to remember the lake's name. It was like Lake Wicacacha. And he's going off. Your mother would know the lake name. Too bad she's dead. And then he just wanders off. And it's like, there's something about that where on the face of it, reading that line is sort of horrifying. But it's the kind of shit that people say about dead people a couple of years after, right? You got to get, you know, it felt very real, even though it was an extremely funny sitcom line. Tara: [15:03] Yeah. Dave: [15:03] Everything about that sort of like neatly slotted into this sitcom reality, you know, that they built here. And it felt real there. And I could actually also picture, you know, my mom saying that or something a couple of years after my dad died. Tara: [15:18] It's the mustard he gives it because he's sort of distracted. He's like your mother would know too bad she's dead like there's no edge to it he's just like really thought that in the moment while he was trying to summon the memory, yeah and the primal conflict here is when they keep playing out in different contexts to the you know I'm second I'm first sort of thing this is It comes up again, for sure. And key to the dynamic between the two of them is how when these opportunities come up, Niles and Frazier always think whatever it is, they'll be great at it because they're so smart and evolved. And they discover that when it comes to running a restaurant or investigating a murder or writing a book, they are, in fact, idiots. And of course, this is, you know, this is one of the things the show is about, that they're mental health professionals and their own mental health is maybe not the greatest. Sarah: [16:07] Well and they're that they're completely estranged from their own background their own history their own neuroses how it informs their actions and their relationship and from the idea that every other time they've tried to collaborate on something there's just a bunch of fucking stentorian declaiming and hollering and marty sitting in his chair trying to ignore it and read the paper or watch a basketball game and they always think it's going to be different which is like the definition of insanity, which is kind of amazing. They are like known psychiatrists. Tara: [16:41] Brilliant. Yeah. James Burroughs directed this episode, as I mentioned, and we've definitely talked about him before. He's a co-creator of Cheers. Extremely prolific to this day, in fact, and started as a theater director. And I wouldn't say you always see it in his episodes of whatever he's directing across multiple different sitcoms. But when we get to the physical fight, it's so clear. These are three people who know how to block a scene. And Sarah, you already mentioned the farce of this, this feels like, I think Frasier in general is a more theatrical show and a more physical show than Cheers was. Did this strike you as well? Sarah: [17:14] Yeah, and especially whenever we're re-watching a Frasier episode, our eyes are always on Pierce because his just 100% leaving it all on the floor physicality is amazing. There's one sequence that like I always am trying to figure out a way to get it into the canon or the tiny canon, but it involves him like having a nosebleed and fainting repeatedly and then trying to like- Yes. Tara: [17:45] That's so good. Sarah: [17:46] And like fainting at the sight of his own blood and then he keeps subsiding on the couch. There's nobody else in the scene and all you can really derive from listening to it is that the studio audience thought it was fucking hilarious because it was. Tara: [17:59] Yep. Sarah: [17:59] Yeah, these are definitely people who have, they know where their light is, as Tyra would say. And even in the beginning of the scene where the fight is, where Frasier is drunk, and then you have the sight gag of Niles who has his undershirt, but then the suspenders are on over it. Frasier is laying behind him on the bed at a 90-degree angle and pouring a mini bottle into his mouth like he's at a bar in spring break. And it's just like, The way the scenes are laid out and the way the sets are designed in order to like maximize site gags that are happening in different fields and grounds within it is just really good. And it's so good that a lot of the time you don't notice it unless you're specifically talking about an episode the way we are today. Dave: [18:49] I guess the physicality is so different from Cheers. If you think of Cheers, how they shot it, it's a lot of wide shots of the bar, but also everybody's either sitting down or there's a piece of wood between people. So there's very little physicality in that show. It is more, you know, the dialogue, that back and forth there that, you know, substitutes for what we get here with the physical stuff, I suppose. One of the things that Niles does, speaking to his physicality, even in the small moments, when he first starts writing, he's, my fingers are poised over the keys. And then he's got like this jazz magic user, I'm going to explain it as, over his ubiquitous compact SLT computer, which was everywhere at the time. At first, I thought it was one of those word processors because the screen was so small, but it was like, oh yeah, no, that was the computer everybody had in the early 90s on the Windows sides of things. Sarah: [19:40] Yeah, no, I have a sense memory of how hot they got too. Dave: [19:44] Yeah, because like there's 10,000 drives and things right under the keyboard. You can see the heat waves coming off it. But that moment was really great too. And it's just like a little tiny, throwaway moment, but he really sells it. Tara: [19:56] Yeah, it sometimes strikes me all over again, like, what a miracle it is that Pierce not only existed to play this part, because he looks and sounds so much like Kelsey Grammer. But, like, I just imagine the day of the auditions where everyone else was sitting in the room, then he walked in and being like, well, fuck, I guess I'm not getting this one. I mean, before he was famous, just physically, they're so much alike. But he's also just so skilled at the kind of performance this part requires. The physical comedy is so key to their characters. The one thing that rang slightly false to me as a foundational premise is that Niles, A, didn't research whatever his original pitch was, and B, has been procrastinating on coming up with something else. Did anyone else feel like this was out of character for him? I feel like they blow past it fast enough that it's like, oh, okay, fine. But thinking about it again, as Sarah said, for the purpose of a podcast, I was like, hey, wait a minute. Sarah: [20:50] Yeah. I mean, now that you mention it, that doesn't really make sense. But then a lot of the sort of sitcom-ier elements of it, like the show often does this, like they'll just fucking put any damn person or say any damn thing on this radio station. And they change station managers like Kleenex. I mean, there's like always time slot changes and funding problems. And it's like they wisely don't dwell. I would also like to say candidate for stealth MVP. She's barely in the episode, but Roz, when she hears about how Niles is going to be on the show, this is like well before they could stand to be in the same space together. Her, oh no, when she hears what's going to happen is, I mean, I don't know. I love Roz, justice for Roz. And I also love that the show, it's not part of this episode, but the show is sort of like, we will use this to make jokes, but we don't actually judge her for being free with her sexuality. So yeah, I've always appreciated that. But yeah, now that you mention it, no, that doesn't hold up. But it does occur to me that they hand wave a lot of things so they can jump into a plot faster. Like, have these people ever spent a weekend not in a lodge two hours out of town? How many bathrobes does Frasier have? I mean, there's a lot. But they just breeze right past it because they know that's not why you're watching. Tara: [22:18] Yeah, no, of course. That's very picky of me. I would say if the issue is that he's such a perfectionist, because it's been established by this point, he's very fastidious with dusting off his chair at Cafe Nervosa, etc. They could just have him say a couple of lines about he's such a perfectionist that he has 500 ideas and he doesn't want to pick the wrong one or something. That would have made more sense. But whatever. I'm not, you know, I'm not mad at it. We all have experience collaborating on a creative project. We are, in fact, doing it right now. What do we think is the episode's most useful object lesson in how not to do it? I have a couple. While you guys think about it, I would say be gentle giving feedback. The compliment sandwich, it's real. Sarah: [23:01] Mm-hmm. Tara: [23:02] You know, we say, I like this. I was not crazy about this, but I love this. That's how you do it. But I'll also say working late at night is fine. God and Sarah know I have done it. She has seen some timestamps of emails with, you know, a four at the beginning and then an a.m. at the end. Sarah: [23:19] But the 90210 book. Oh, my God. There was what you're like. All right. Well, see you on Slack tomorrow. And then when tomorrow came and you arrived on Slack, I had not left. It was like me, a six pack of Coke, a box of Ritz crackers and chapter four. And I fucking got it done. So, yeah. Tara: [23:36] Yeah. Sarah: [23:36] It's fine. Tara: [23:37] But. In terms of working late, if you're a night owl, that's not the time to make any final decisions, in my opinion. Dave, what did you learn from this episode not to do as a creative person? Dave: [23:48] Oh, well, I was going to try to ham fist in the headphones for the TV because that never works. I'm surprised it worked there. Tara: [23:55] Yeah. Dave: [23:56] For the whole TV. Now, it's easy to do if you just want to listen to your Apple TV or whatever, and you can use Bluetooth throughout it. But it's always been a struggle. And there's always something you have to buy that costs $6 and 53 cents on Amazon and you plug it in and it like just never works. Tara: [24:11] Yeah. Dave: [24:11] But that has nothing to do with writing a book. So let's go to Sarah. Sarah: [24:15] I don't think they made this explicit, but the fact that, I mean, they did because there's like a time lapse when they still only have one sentence. But you and I found many times, like, just don't get bogged down in the perfect intro. We call it the throat clearing. And it's like, sometimes you just got to blather on for 20 minutes and you have all these garbage sentences that sound like AI wrote them and you just go back and cut it later, but you have to start. Otherwise, you'll never finish. So I don't think they learned that, but they sort of communicated it subtly to the viewer, I would say. But I remember just being like, just keep going, just keep going, outline, outline. Tara: [24:57] Yeah, totally. Getting started, even if you do have an outline, is hard. And I have discovered later in life that when I have to write a review or whatever, I will outline it and then just write the first paragraph to the thesis statement and then come back to it later. Because the other thing I've discovered, if I don't do that, it's still processing in the back of my mind at other times where I'm like, what about this? What about this? So that's my new hack. And that's the episode. That's author, author. It's hard not to canonize every Frasier episode, but I was glad to have another avenue to this one because it's always been a fave. Dave: [25:30] And that is it for this episode of Extra, Extra Hot Great. We started our three of these feature for 2025 with Frasier's brotherly book author episode. But we're not done with this year's special club-only coverage. There's two more author-themed episodes to go, plus This Week in Historical TV sometime during the year, and other club-only delights. Thank you all for your support. And we're listening. I forgot what I did here. I am David Teagle, and on behalf of Tara Arianna. Tara: [26:07] What makes you not think I know where she is? Dave: [26:09] And Sarah D. Bunting. Sarah: [26:10] For the record, that wasn't a run-on. Dave: [26:12] Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time, right here on Extra Extra Hot Great. Come on, the. Sarah: [26:29] It's Uber?