22 Years Later, Frasier's Worst Episode Has Aged Like Milk

Although Frasier might be one of the most fondly remembered sitcoms of the ‘90s, the Cheers spinoff’s worst episode jeopardizes this entire reputation. Running from 1993 until 2004, Frasier was an NBC sitcom that centered on Kelsey Grammer’s Cheers supporting character Frasier and his return to his hometown of Seattle. Frasier works as a radio host and an on-air psychiatrist/agony uncle to callers, all while living with his retired father Martin, his little brother Niles, and Martin’s live-in carer Daphne. While the legacy of Cheers is unique in the world of US network sitcoms, Frasier is a rare spinoff that managed to equal the acclaim of its predecessor. The show is often listed among the best sitcoms of the 1990s and 2000s, despite stiff competition from the likes of Seinfeld, Friends, and How I Met Your Mother. In fact, many critics and fans consider Frasier to be one of the best American sitcoms ever. Frasier won a total of 37 Primetime Emmy Awards and netted the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series five years in a row, making the sitcom spinoff an unalloyed success story. Its legacy was somewhat marred by 2023’s Frasier reboot, a revival that only lasted two seasons, failed to bring back Niles or Daphne, and was seen as a lesser effort by most critics. While not as disastrous as Grammer’s ten-episode flop Hank, the revival was an unfortunately misguided outing. However, this was far from Frasier’s first misstep. Frasier Season 11 Episode 14 “Freudian Sleep” Is Deservedly Hated Frasier 1993 cast Originally airing in February 2004, “Freudian Sleep” arrived midway through the original final season of Frasier. The plot of the episode, threadbare as it is, sees Martin and Ronee accidentally invite Frasier, Niles, and a pregnant Daphne to Ronee’s boss’s remote cabin in the mountains for an ostensibly relaxing weekend. A getaway vacation that throws together mismatched characters and couples is a classic setup for sitcom fun, and the earlier, superior Frasier episodes “The Ski Lodge” (season 5, episode 14) and “Four For the Seesaw” (season 4, episode 13) fulfill this promise perfectly. However, for some bizarre reason, the writers of “Freudian Sleep” instead opted to center the majority of the episode around a series of nightmares suffered by the main characters. As such, almost all the screen time of “Freudian Sleep” is devoted to a quartet of dream sequences that have no bearing on the world of the characters. There have been sitcoms that pulled off ambitious experimental episodes like this before, and the classic ‘90s sitcom Roseanne had a similarly silly episode, “Sweet Dreams,” that worked well. However, “Freudian Sleep” does little but highlight all the show’s shortcomings with its increasingly unfunny nightmare sequences. The episode’s initial setup is hardly strong, from creepy, outdated jokes about Ronee trading sex with her boss for access to his cabin to the contrived manner in which Daphne, Niles, and Frasier are accidentally brought along for the trip. However, any comedic potential falls off a cliff as the dream starts in earnest. Frasier’s dream, wherein Niles is dead, and Frasier is married to Daphne, is merely a retread of tired territory the show had danced to death dozens of times by its final season. Frasier is jealous of his brother’s settled romantic life, worried about his own legacy, and frustrated professionally. However, things go from dull to terrible with Niles’s nightmare about his impending fatherhood, which is shot more like an obnoxious Nickelodeon show than an ordinary Frasier episode. Daphne’s dream is even worse, mostly consisting of a string of fat phobic jokes about her fear of gaining weight due to pregnancy. “Freudian Sleep” Highlights Frasier’s Biggest Problem David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane in Frasier If all of these setups sound more suited to an episode of Frasier’s middling revival than the acclaimed original show, that’s likely because the series was running out of creative juice by its final season. There are a few unexpectedly great moments in season 11, but by and large, the end of the sitcom’s original run was not overly inspired, and “Freudian Sleep” was its weakest outing. The dream episode concludes with a song and dance number from Ronee and Martin that sadly felt more perfunctory than inspired. While the idea of Ronee and Martin staging a tribute to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sounds irresistible, “Freudian Sleep” is such a slog that the episode managed to make this ending feel flat and predictable. In the process, the episode highlighted the biggest issue underlying the show’s writing. For all its acclaim as a supposedly smarter breed of US network sitcom, Frasier relied on hackneyed gags involving sexism, fat phobia, homophobia, and outdated gender stereotypes more often than many viewers may recall. From season 10, episode 12, “The Harassed,” which depicts workplace sexual harassment as a big joke, to season 1, episode 14, “Slow Tango in South Seattle,” wherein Frasier’s own history of grooming by a piano teacher in his teenage years is played for laughs, Frasier truly was a show of its time. That time had some strange, often retrograde attitudes toward women, trans people, and members of the LGBT community, and Frasier reflected this in plenty of its more regrettable plots and gags. Frasier Had More Than One Regrettable Episode Image courtesy of Everett Collection While Frasier’s revival featured fewer gags based on these poorly aged tropes, that later series had another issue of its own. In the two decades since Frasier had ruled the airwaves alongside Friends, the sitcom landscape had changed immeasurably. Shows like How I Met Your Mother experimented with non-linear storytelling, flash-forwards, flashbacks, and unreliable narrators while maintaining a mainstream network sitcom style, prompting hits like 30 Rock and Community to take this meta play even further. Related Paramount+’s Legacy Sitcom Reboot Is Not Yet Dead (Despite Being Already Cancelled For A Year) Despite being canceled for nearly a year now, Paramount+'s legacy sitcom reboot that has wasted potential can apparently still come back. Thus, by the time Frasier returned to the air, dozens of sitcoms had reshaped the average TV viewer’s ideas of what the TV staple could look like. Even though a small handful of hits like Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage still held onto conventions like the laugh track and multi-camera setup, the return of Frasier’s original style and tone couldn’t help but feel hopelessly dated when the revival began in 2023. As a result, Frasier’s failure to recapture the popularity of its glory days should be a sobering warning to any potential Cheers reboots looming on the horizon in the future. Release Date 1993 - 2004-00-00 Directors Kelsey Grammer, David Clark Lee, James Burrows, Pamela Fryman, Sheldon Epps, Philip Charles MacKenzie, Jeff Melman, Katy Garretson, Scott Ellis, Wil Shriner, Andy Ackerman, Robert H. Egan, Jerry Zaks, Cynthia J. Popp, Gordon Hunt, Alan Myerson Writers David Lloyd, Ken Levine, Heide Perlman, Saladin K. Patterson, David Isaacs, Patricia Breen, Leslie Eberhard, Peter Huyck, Brad Hall, Don Siegel, Jordan Hawley, Lloyd Garver, William Schifrin, Dave Hackel

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