Frasier Fantasy
edward-la-barbera.itch.io
edward-la-barbera.itch.io
It's also an interesting coherent world they made for the sitcom so the many locations can be expended to the Opera, the Symphony, Wine Club and on and on. I would pay for these 'episodes'!
Maybe you're right. But I'm yet to see much evidence that AI is actually good at comedy. It's something a whole lot of humans can't do either.
Some studio is almost certainly feeding sitcoms and standup comedy into some horrific LolLLM, but it would almost certainly reject prompts such as “The gang goes black” or “Frank gets molested”, and the outcome of “The gang makes Lethal Weapon 6” is unlikely to be even half as entertaining.
But as I said, I haven't seen the new series so I cannot comment on whether there's anything there to grow from.
Was this post actually written by Frasier the character?
/s
However, I cannot help but wonder in this presumably inevitable techno future of ours, how we will ever talk to anyone about the eventually fever dream quality of media that we'll each individually be consuming in unique niches.
I'm already reading Blindsight and wondering how in the world I can even try to explain this to people in my life. Somehow I imagine that it's going to be a lot more difficult to explain why I'm crying my eyes out after Magneto-Gandalf saves the power rangers from certain death from Venom Frasier and then convinces Frasier to finally take off the black suit.
The book clearly does a lot of legwork in the 'third act' to really sell the main thesis. Which is great the first time through, but I think makes subsequent readthroughs less impactful. I however always enjoy about the first two thirds.
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time looking at the increasingly complex behavior (and even downright 'cleverness') of non-conscious entities. So my takeaway is less "life, but not as we know it" and more "YES, just like that, that's exactly what I've been trying to tell people for years." Unfortunately, explaining my day job in terms of Blindsight isn't exactly a step up.
If that doesn't make you tear up, you're dead inside. That's my explanation.
Shaka.
I still have my Michael Wave plush
The temporary Twitch suspension was due to some of the generated dialogue. I'm not clear if they were forced to remove the Seinfeld stuff? In any case, the new version just doesn't compare: https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever
"It'll blow your socks clean off clicking sound, wink and gun"
- AI generated Matthew McConaghey, 2033
If anyone was curious how this was made, it looks like it was made using GB Studio (according to the creator's posts on reddit[2])
Also wanted to point out that Frasier is coming back on Paramount+[3].
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/chiptunes/comments/175owc6/frasiers...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gbstudio/comments/174wrwh/frasier_f...
You aren't alone. I got maybe ten minutes in. It is the now Kelsey Grammer show. He is surrounded by actors that do not challenge him at any level. In Frasier, it was a groups of actors/characters, each of which could carry an episode on their own. Frasier also did edgy stuff, for the time. This new thing is just another rehash of "old guy revisits past acquaintances", akin to Picard but without the trek ornamentation and excitement.
I wasn't blown away by the first episode but I'm interested to keep going. People often forget the the first season of many shows (comedies particularly) are particularly ropey while the writers and actors find their groove.
That said I'm considering it an entirely different show to the previous Frasier, much like Cheers was. I'm kind of glad they haven't gone directly back to the old well.
Parent mentioned Picard, well the first season of ST:TNG is a prime example of this. Some of the worst episodes in all of Star Trek are in that season.
Enduring the bad in hope of the good is for those without options.
lol, I feel like that sounded very good in your head… we're talking about half hour sitcoms here, not eternal strife.
If you gave up on comedies within the first ten minutes you’d miss some of the best that’s been done in recent years. But sure, keep sampling things at ten minute intervals if it’s what suits you best.
That being said, I like it so far.
"Yeah it gets good around season 2." So you start watching around season 2. You don't slog through the dross first.
For sure the other characters (and actors) are no match, but he had a head start on it. I hope they dial down the cartoonish aspect of some of them.
Our Frasier Remake - crowdsourced, collaborative art project where more than 130 animators, filmmakers, and Frasier fans from 11 different countries have remade the Seattle Psychiatrist most meta episode... one frame at a time.
The brothers get themselves into the stupidest situations, make asses of themselves, and never come out on top. Its the opposite of Seinfeld( great show).
What I generally intend by "harmless fun" is exemplified by the episode where they buy and ruin a posh restaurant in a day, but you never hear any mention of the financial ruin from that. Whether they're super rich or not is simply not explored in the show because it's not relevant to the goals of the storyteller. It's like a cartoon: they've just got infinite resources whenever a plot calls for it.
That's quite unlike Bob's Burgers, for example, where they're constantly pointing out that they can't even pay rent on time and there's a constant looming anxiety about finances (which to the credit of the show, contrasts meaningfully with how the children are happy and healthy and want for little)
What?? I thought the show obviously portrayed Frasier and Niles as wealthy yuppies.
Frasier rents a luxurious 3 bedroom apartment and Niles is married to a woman named Maris who is the heir to a urinal cake fortune. They live in a mansion!
Not nationally syndicated. Only broadcast in the Seattle area.
I think the parent is referring to Niles' brief stay at the Shangri-La, not the Montana.
I don't want to call it "self deception". But their fine intellects allow them to interpret anything to suit their preferences. To rationalize anything. And they do.
Which is some oft used plot grist, of course.
To your point, like Fraiser, it's often used a plot device in Bob's Burgers and generally, like Fraiser, everything turns out OK. For me, a lot of it is more defining the social class and context of the show. Will the character be comfortable in a wine club? How will they interact with this setting? What problems would they have?
I've seen and loved 99% of Frasier episodes, and never once thought of it as a high-stakes show.
Perhaps it's because I lack empathy, but I'd like to think that it's that I have always lacked the desire for pretension (despite having an educational, professional, and social background not dissimilar to the Crane brothers'), so never took personally the anxiety Frasier or Niles felt at failing to fit into some gathering of their peers.
Upon further pondering, more proof of this is that I am among those who get very anxious when I see people get embarrassed. But it has to be a situation where it feels "unfair". When Frasier or Niles make fools of themselves it's always because of their own pretensions, not anyone else's.
This is totally it. I would add that for me it's extra cozy because I used to watch it (and love it) as a kid growing up in Eastern Europe and now, I live in Seattle! I rewatched it sometime during the pandemic and the jokes hit way closer to home than when I was a 13 yo kid, both from the fact that I'm now an adult and from the fact that I understand why someone calling from Tacoma has a different problem that someone calling from Medina hahaha. All in all, a great show.
I also didn’t realize that almost all of the callers are uncredited celebrities.
Yes! That's another sort of 'easter egg' I found when I rewatched it. There was someone who sounded just like David Duchovny and I looked it up and down the rabbit hole I went.
Still worth rewatching, however.
Another interesting example of 90s sitcoms and evolving gender roles would be Ross from Friends. A modern expectation of how a man should act in a long-term relationship would probably consider him to be emotionally abusive. But I didn't find his conduct all that bad in the 90s. I think a few years ago it was a fad for gen-z to watch Friends, so I think I'm not the only person to note this.
Fun fact (or conspiracy), Cheers and by extension the character of Frasier Crane were plagiarized from a late 70s local Boston sitcom called Park Street Under.
Harvey: “Look, I’m Dr. Harvey Dorfman. I wrote the book Success Through Fear. [Audience laughs.]…I live in the South End, so perhaps I can help you. And I’m a psychologist, so I’m qualified to help you. And I’m sympathetic, so I’d like to help you. Can I help you?”
I love the line about "Success Through Fear."
I'd be curious to know if Dorfman had a Boston accent. Frasier's character worked because he was an outsider to Boston. Also, IIRC his references to psychiatry were supposed to come off as earnest-- and often pretentious-- setups for the other characters' punch lines, unlike this quote.
I think one of the most interesting things in Frasier is his struggle to find his identity, between radio host and psychiatrist. As far as I remember on the show he never had any "real" patients, just his callers.
Kelsey Grammer I know was cast as "Sideshow Bob" on the Simpsons before he was a radio host in Frasier, but I always thought he brought a lot of the Frasier character to the Sideshow Bob character. The disdain manifesting of course as homicidal rage with Bob.
I've seen 99% of Frasier episodes and never once got the sense that Frasier has disdain for his callers.
The show wouldn't work if he did, because Frasier is a good person. His snobbishness and pretensions are funny characteristics, but they don't define him.
If anything, Niles is the one who envies his brother, however mildly; despite his jokes about Frasier's "fast-food" psychiatry, Niles sometimes admits to envying how his brother is well-known, and that he helps many people over the air while Niles's own work is anonymous to the public.
I don't know where this idea that Frasier is a snob comes from. A "snob", to me, is someone who looks down upon those he views as his lessers; views them as fundamentally different and forever unable to achieve his own far greater status. Frasier never once acts as a snob to his uneducated father. He never shows anything but respect for Daphne despite being the product of a family from the bottom of Manchester, and never says or implies that she would in any way be unfit for Niles (Niles's own marital status conflicting with his lust is a different story).
Frasier sometimes gets irritated by Martin's habits, or failure to appreciate the same things as his sons. He sometimes gets irritated (but more often amused/bemused) by a rambling or bizarre story from Daphne. But if such is the definition of snobbery then we are all snobs. To put another way, we are all snobbish about some things (and the Crane brothers have more things on their own lists than most people), but only snobs believe that such things make them inherently better than others.
It's true that Niles also envies Frasier. This is not mutually exclusive - there's no need for any "if anything" statements that require a binary choice.
As for snobbishness - I didn't mention that. So I'm not sure what to make of the bulk of your comment.
This is the head writer of Park Street Under. He's writing an article about the extent to which Cheers copied his show.
He quotes zero lines between the two shows that are similar.
There's another article that goes into more detail:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2018/03/20...
From that one it seems clear that the similarity is the choice of character roles and the setting, and not at all in the lines of the scripts for the pilot or any of the other episodes.
It stinks that they lifted those things. But that's not what I had assumed when I read the word "plagiarized" in OP's comment.
(To the head writer's credit, he never used that word.)
Edit: clarification
> Cheers director James Burrows has long denied his show was lifted from Park St. Under, maintaining that it was inspired by Duffy’s Tavern, a radio program created in the 1940s by his father, Abe, a Tony Award–winning humorist and writer. The troika of Cheers creators... claimed to have modeled the Cheers bar on Boston’s Bull & Finch, which they visited while developing the sitcom.
> The similarities between the two make an argument for some kind of influence. The question of whether Cheers took something from Park St. Under, however, obscures something vital: As special as the little Boston sitcom was, and there’s reason to think it was truly loved, it was never going to be Cheers. It had its shot. ABC Entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos... told Bennett, “I like them, but I just want to tell you they’re really not deserving of being on the ABC network level.”
> One reason, perhaps, why the legend lived on so long is that Cheers affirmed that there really was something great about Park St. Under.
> To me, the things that are so lovable about Park St. Under—the local feel, the rough-around-the-edges inside jokes that make it seem familiar—aren’t the things that made Cheers such a hit.... With its production woes and shoestring budget, she didn’t even think season two of Park St. Under was likely to happen. The claim that Cheers made off with a ready-made hit misses what the local show really was—the good and the bad.
> Does this mean the legend is finally done? Doubtful... The claim that Cheers looted the show is just too juicy and has been part of local legend for too long to be forgotten entirely.
> Three men developed and created the Cheers television series: Glen and Les Charles ("Glen and Les") and James Burrows, who identified themselves as "two Mormons and a Jew."
> The original idea was a group of workers who interacted like a family, the goal being a concept similar to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The creators considered making an American version of the British Fawlty Towers, set in a hotel or an inn. When the creators settled on a bar as their setting, the show began to resemble the radio program Duffy's Tavern, originally written and co-created by James Burrows' father Abe Burrows. They liked the idea of a tavern, as it provided a continuous stream of new people, for a variety of characters.
> Early discussions about the location of the show centered on Barstow, California, then Kansas City, Missouri. They eventually turned to the East Coast and finally Boston. The Bull & Finch Pub in Boston, which was the model for Cheers, was chosen from a phone book. When Glen Charles asked the bar's owner, Tom Kershaw, to shoot exterior and interior photos, he agreed, charging $1.
Like 12 people in a writer's room may contribute to an episode fairly equally, but only one person's name is semi-randomly chosen as the official writing credit.
I served my LDS mission in Nevada. One day, while tracting, we knocked on the door of the Charles brothers' parents. One of the sons' Emmys sat on the cable box on the TV.
https://timworthington.org/2021/02/04/looks-unfamiliar-74-ma...
(Judging by the down votes nobody caught the reference)
All your base are belong to Maris
The blinking contest is the end, isn't it?
This looks great, I'll play it when I get home for sure.
Compare that with Niles who grows throughout the show after losing everything. Niles at least realizes being rich isn't important if you're not happy.
It’s not misogyny, narcissism or a sense of entitlement. It’s that these boys were raised by the TV and socialised into a system of courtship based on putting in superficial acts of niceness and receiving heartfelt love and affection in return. Regrettably when they find out the truth they often lash out at the women, because who would do such a thing as go on TV and tell lies?