https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2016/03/25/where-everybody-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://timworthington.org/2021/02/04/looks-unfamiliar-74-ma...