The Frasier Writers Set Out To Make An Anti-Seinfeld Sitcom

There's so much about "Frasier" that conveys the comforting aura of a quintessential '90s sitcom. The "Frasier" sets, which cost a shocking amount of money to build, though designed with a distinct wood-paneled aesthetic that has since become known as "Frasurbane," still maintained the familiar warmth of sitcom sets from the era. The live studio audience and laugh track, the comedic rhythms, even the film grain — it all belongs to a golden age of sitcoms that should be familiar to every single '90s kid that grew up on "Frasier," "Friends," and "Seinfeld."

But there's also something distinctly different about "Frasier." Though it shared much in common with those other legendary sitcoms of the era, it was also quite clearly attempting something new. It wasn't just that Kelsey Grammer's Dr. Crane and his brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), were the kind of elitist social climbers that you didn't see fronting other sitcoms. It also wasn't that the show's humor frequently dealt with more sophisticated and arcane topics than its contemporaries. From the very first episode of "Frasier," the writers were subtly subverting many sitcom tropes that had become well-established by the time the series hit the air in 1993. In fact, co-creator David Lee had one specific sitcom in mind as an example of what not to do when it came to crafting "Frasier."

"Frasier" ran for 11 seasons from 1993 to 2004, cementing its status as one of the great sitcoms in the process — a legacy the neither disappointing nor remarkable "Frasier" revival show has yet to live up to. While many '90s kids might now think of the show as a comfort watch, the series was actually quite subversive in its own way, and demonstrated a sort of anti-sitcom sentiment right from its pilot episode — an episode that, incidentally, Niles actor David Hyde Pierce initially thought was "terrible."

David Lee once spoke to the Television Academy Foundation about writing that pilot, explaining some of the guiding principles that he and his writing team had in place. Specifically, the show's writers set out to deconstruct and in some cases flat out rally against major sitcom tropes of the time, with Lee explaining how the rise of "Seinfeld" gave them a perfect formula to subvert. In his own words:

"At the time 'Seinfeld' was on the ascendency and it was the beginning of what I call 'short attention span theater,' where the scenes and sitcoms had gotten shorter and shorter and shorter until it was basically, 'Here's an exterior of a building, you come inside for two or three jokes, and then you're on to the next scene.' Lots of scenes, short hits, and those work great, they're wonderful. But we decided to try something different."

Lee went on to explain his and his writers' approach to making "Frasier" the anti-"short attention span theater" exemplified by "Seinfeld." It started with the group writing "the longest scenes possible," with Lee claiming that the goal was ultimately "to have a whole episode that took place in real-time, or to have an act in which there was only one scene, in other words sort of like a play." But this sort of anti-sitcom approach to writing a sitcom extended far beyond longer than normal scenes.

To be clear, "Frasier" was not a complete overhaul of the sitcom format. Not only was it created by three sitcom legends in the form of David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee of "Cheers" fame, but it also used the same multi-camera shooting format utilized on every other sitcom of the moment. "Frasier" made use of sitcom directing legend James Burrows, who also transitioned from "Cheers" to "Frasier" and who lent his talents to pretty much every show of the genre ever made, including "Friends." Couple that with the studio audience and the aforementioned general 90s aura of the whole thing and you've got a sitcom that, on the surface, isn't exactly a revolution of the genre.

But when you look more closely, "Frasier" really was trying surprisingly unconventional things throughout its run. Take the black title cards that separate acts. These trademarks of the series are yet another aspect that grew out of Lee and his writers' desire to subvert sitcom standards. As Lee went on to explain in his Television Academy Foundation interview, the mindset was best summed up as, "Do we need those exterior shots of buildings? Is the audience smart enough to know that if we're in Frasier's apartment that he's probably inside an apartment building, and we don't need to see the outside of it?" Indeed, these sorts of establishing shots are so deeply embedded in the DNA of sitcoms that we barely notice it when the camera pans up the side of the "Friends" apartment building in New York accompanied by a quick musical sting to signal the start of a new scene, or even when we get an opening shot of Jerry's own building in "Seinfeld."

For Lee and his crew, however, doing away with this standard feature of sitcoms was a necessity, leading to the creation of the black title cards between scenes. Even then, "Frasier" pushed things ever further by eschewing any kind of musical accompaniment whatsoever. "We don't have to have music," Lee noted, "and to this day I think it is still the only sitcom that does not have interstitial music cues for whatever that's worth." In that sense, while "Frasier" is more than capable of lulling you into '90s-sitcom induced comfort, it is simultaneously maintaining a deceptively disruptive approach, giving us all yet another reason to love the show.