The Gay Sensibility of ‘Frasier’ Was Ahead of Its Time
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The setup is a classic farce: Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) feels guilty that his live-in housekeeper Daphne (Jane Leeves) is having trouble finding a boyfriend, so he invites his attractive new radio station boss Tom (Eric Lutes) over for drinks in the hopes of setting them up. What he doesn’t know is that Tom is gay, and — misled by Frasier’s petty producer Roz (Peri Gilpin) — thinks Frasier is also gay and inviting him on a date. Over the course of an increasingly chaotic evening, a series of mishaps and misunderstandings — Frasier telling Tom about the great view “from his bedroom,” his father Martin (John Mahoney) talking about a bar where he hangs out with young police officers, his brother Niles’ (David Hyde Pierce) entire vibe — Tom comes to the conclusion that the entire Crane family is a pack of flaming homosexuals.
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On paper, the plot for the Season 2 “Frasier” episode “The Matchmaker” sounds like a cringy relic of the past, the type of sitcom episode that traffics on gay stereotypes and wouldn’t win the GLAAD award it managed to get at the time in a more inclusive and queer TV landscape. And yet, watching in 2023, the episode has aged like the finest wines in the Crane liquor cabinet. Tom isn’t really a gay stereotype; he’s mostly a regular man, who if anything reads queerness into the ridiculous straight people he finds himself surrounded by. When Frasier discovers Tom’s sexuality, he’s upset and embarrassed about the situation he got himself into, but doesn’t descend into an outright gay panic; instead, he calmly explains the situation to his boss, and the two part ways as friends, with Tom pretty much the only person that night with his dignity still intact.
In 1994, “Frasier” wasn’t exactly the only TV show on television that had one-off gay characters pop by for the mostly straight cast to react to. That same year, “Friends” aired its first season, which featured Ross’ (David Schwimmer) lesbian ex-wife and her partner, as well as an entire episode about Chandler (Matthew Perry) growing concerned about why everyone who meets him assumes he’s gay. But looking back at the shows in hindsight, “Frasier’s” gay characters like Tom or Edward in Season 7 classic “Out With Dad” feel less insulting, less token than the ones from “Friends,” which has been lambasted in the years since its conclusion for tacky gay jokes that haven’t held up past the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era.
Part of it is because of how “Frasier” positions the gay characters it introduced over the course of its run. Tom and Edward were never mocked by their respective episodes, with the actual clowns being the straight cast members who embarrassed themselves by failing to read the room and recognize their queerness. But the main reason why it feels less offensive when “Frasier” makes its gay jokes is that, even when every character on screen was “straight,” the show itself was always more than a little gay.
To start with, one of the show’s creators, David Lee, is openly gay. Lee directed “The Matchmaker,” which was written by gay staff writer Joe Keenan, and the two collaborated on many of the show’s other episodes that featured LGBT characters, including “Out With Dad” and “The Ski Lodge,” bringing a queer sensibility that prevented gay people from ever being the butt of the joke on said episodes. In the cast, two male regulars were gay in real life: Pierce, who came out in 2007 years after the finale, and Dan Butler, who played Frasier’s co-worker Bulldog and came out about a year into the sitcom’s 11-season run. Both brought a queerness to the show in their own ways: Pierce was effete and mannered, while Butler’s portrayal as the cartoonishly horny and sexist Bulldog reads a bit like straight guy drag.
Beyond the show’s behind-the-scenes personnel, though, “Frasier’s” swanky, urbane milieu and characters have a queer appeal that separated it from other domestic sitcoms of the time. Female leads Roz and Daphne are easy for gay fans to root for, between Roz’s sexual independence and Daphne’s heightened campiness. That’s not even getting into recurring characters like Frasier’s agent Bebe (Harriet Sansom Harris), whose loud-mouthed, take-no-prisoners attitude is practically catnip for gay viewers. The title character and Niles had a taste for culture and a background that skewed decidedly queer: they attended operas, referenced Stephen Sondheim, abhorred football and beer, and made references to getting picked on in high school for being wimpy and not into sports. Of course, the two weren’t actually gay. But episodes like “The Matchmaker” existed to acknowledge that their personalities were, frankly, a little gay.
“Frasier’s” queerness also went far deeper than just the trappings of the series. Stripped of its subplots and supporting characters, the sitcom was always a series about the title character, his brother, and his father. The show’s third episode “Dinner at Eight” laid out the central conflict between the three cleanly. In the episode, Niles and Frasier are embarrassed by their father’s red-blooded, macho interests, and decide to take him to the fanciest French restaurant in town. Mishaps cause them to instead wind up at Martin’s favorite place, a tacky steak place called Timber Mill, where they spend the entire dinner insulting the wait staff and the masculine, lumber lodge decor. The show positions the situation as the two psychologists exposing themselves as massive snobs, and they undoubtedly are massive snobs. But there’s another element to the father-sons relationship, a conflict between traditional masculinity and a decidedly queer sensibility the Crane brothers shared.
Frasier and Niles would both grow closer to their father over the years of the show, and the frostiness between the men that made the original episodes of the show so emotionally charged would eventually melt away in favor of sunnier straightforward love. But the dynamic “Dinner at Eight” established was present all the way into the show’s last season. Martin was a blue-collar, and very masculine, figure, whose interests were beer, football, police work, and his reclining chair. Frasier and Niles were white-collar and into sophisticated, even slightly femme things, like musical theater, opera, wine tastings, and the like. Father and sons loved each other dearly, but they lived completely different lifestyles and often struggled to find any common interest to bond themselves together.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how that familial relationship can resonate with queer viewers and their own relationships with their parents. Occasional jokes throughout the series acknowledged how the trio’s conflicts could be read as an allegory for gay sons and straight fathers; in “The Ski Lodge,” gay ski instructor Guy (James Patrick Stuart) is lusting after Niles and asks Martin if Niles feels the same way about him. Martin misinterprets the question as a comment on Niles’ long-running crush on Daphne and enthusiastically says “whatever makes [Niles] happy” is fine with him. “You are a wonderful father,” Guy replies earnestly. Niles and Frasier both dated women in the show; in 1993, gay characters were still largely one-episode wonders. But the show’s sly jokes acknowledged the subtextual queerness that underpinned its cast’s central relationships.
Which is why it’s a pity that said queerness is sorely lacking in the show’s revival. “Frasier” 2.0, which premiered on Paramount+ on October 12, is an anomaly in the streaming landscape, the rare revival of a 20th-century classic that is somehow less gay than the original IP it’s resurrecting. Over the first five episodes screened for critics, the only explicitly gay person ever onscreen is one of Frasier’s son Freddy’s (Jack Cutmore-Scott) firefighter coworkers, who briefly mentions she has a wife in the second episode before fading into the background as a largely anonymous minor character. The camp value Roz, Daphne, and Niles added to the show is gone, replaced by a much more straightforward (and just plain straight) network rom-com atmosphere. All three of the younger gen characters — Freddy, his roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro), and Niles and Daphne’s son David (Anders Keith) — are seemingly straight; David in particular is a borderline incel. It’s oddly throwback in the worst possible way.
Even more puzzling, the first episode has a set-up that feels tailor-made for a queer storyline. Frasier visits Freddy’s apartment unannounced (as you do in a sitcom), and discovers his son is living with Eve, whom he never told him about. Freddy, whose complicated feelings about his dad are very apparent, goes along with Frasier’s assumption that they’re a couple and even tells Eve that his dad doesn’t know about someone named Ben. Ben turns out to be Eve’s infant son, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the episode is leading to a coming out moment; there are a few (bad) jokes — like David asking Freddy how many girls he’s kissed at the apartment, or Frasier’s new boss Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) hitting on Freddy in excruciating fashion — where it’s easy to think the punchline is that Freddy isn’t into women.
Instead, Freddy is very much straight, and his reason for faking a relationship with a woman is vaguely left at not wanting Frasier’s judgment for…having a female roommate, or something. The scene where Freddy confesses his lie to his father leads to the revival’s single best moment, where they reminisce about the recently deceased Martin in a sweet tribute to the late Mahoney. But it’s hard to ignore, when Martin is invoked, what’s missing from the revival’s recreation of the original’s father-son dynamic.
“Frasier” very much pulls the classic TV revival trick of reversing the roles of the original show, with the main character now the Martin cohabitating with his polar opposite son; the pilot, named “The Good Father” to contrast with the original’s first episode “The Good Son,” makes what the show is attempting to accomplish very apparent. But Freddy and Frasier’s relationship doesn’t have the heft to it that Martin and Frasier’s did; even from their first scene together, there was a sense of history and bad blood between the men that gave typical sitcom storylines about their domestic squabbles real stakes and energy. And the queer energy inherent to their relationship very much helped to distinguish it from other father-son pairings seen on TV.
It’s not like making Freddy gay, and putting Frasier’s reaction to that at the forefront of the show, would necessarily fix the “Frasier” revival’s major problems. Cutmore-Scott and Grammer don’t have much in the way of comedic or familial chemistry, making it hard to buy into a series about them coming together and growing closer as son and dad. Freddy as written feels less like an actual character and more like a piece of paper with the words “insert straight man here” scribbled on it, and the episodes seen thus far are bizarrely eager to glide over the most glaring fractures in his relationship with his father (i.e. the fact that Frasier moved all the way across the country when his son was an infant, essentially abandoning him) in favor of painfully surface level issues.
But “Frasier” 2.0 saps the queerness of the original away and replaces it with nothing, resulting in a product that’s completely frictionless. Much of what made the original show distinct in its time — its farcical setups and streak of highbrow humor, heightened but highly defined characters, sophisticated trappings, and a slightly camp bent — are gone, and the result is a sitcom that would get lost in the TV Land rerun shuffle. Would an explicit gay storyline make the show good? Maybe not. But at least it would make the show feel more like “Frasier,” instead of a cheap and straightened copy of the original.
“Frasier” (2023) is now streaming on Paramount+. New episodes release weekly on Thursdays.
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