There’s An Entire Online Community Just for People Who Fall Asleep to ‘Frasier’
Of all the holistic, quack-ish and bizarre insomnia cures on the internet, perhaps the most surprising sleep aid used by thousands is a potent cocktail of tossed salad and scrambled eggs.
Roughly 30 million Americans struggle with the common sleep disorder, in which persistent problems falling and staying asleep plague an individual’s circadian rhythm and inflict the punishing and long-lasting effects of sleep deprivation on their minds and bodies. As a licensed psychiatrist, Dr. Frasier Crane is qualified and capable of providing counseling, behavioral therapy or pharmaceutical treatments to help patients struggling with insomnia, which, one might assume, is what inspired one drowsy Frasier fan to create a now 5,371 user strong subreddit dedicated to discussing the sleep-inducing effects of Kelsey Grammer’s critically acclaimed sitcom.
However, instead of going to a shrink for treatment, these fans treat themselves to a bedtime binge of Frasier in order to help themselves nod off to Grammer’s soothing baritone lullaby voice.
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Yesterday, Twitter user Dan Molloy stumbled upon this hyper-specific community and shared his findings with the greater Frasier fandom, inviting us to find out the hard way just how many episodes feature fire alarms.
The actual origin story of r/Frasier_Sleepers starts with a separate comedy show insomnia forum with the same basic premise, r/Futurama_Sleepers, in which nearly 32,000 Futurama fans share their stories of how the year 3000 helps them get their daily eight hours. One Frasier fan who stumbled upon r/Futurama_Sleepers wondered whether a less explosive, more subtle show would be better suited for hypnagogic humor, and, thus, a new niche alternative to melatonin was discovered.
According to the thousands of Frasier sleepers, the pitter-patter of the Seattle rain and subdued tones of the episode “My Coffee with Niles,” which is often cited as one of the show's best in terms of storytelling and comedy qualities, also happens to be the best Frasier episode to put fans to sleep. Switching to decaf could produce a similar effect.
As previously noted, there are also many no-go episodes where loud alarms or piercing screams will inevitably awaken an insomniac, such as the Season Three episode “The Matchmaker” and its smoke alarm scene. Additionally, the early seasons seem to be more conducive to catnaps than the later ones. To that end, the latter half of Season One is the sweet spot, starting, fittingly, with the episode “A Mid-Winter Night’s Dream.”
Though many Frasier fans with sleep problems probably only started the practice of Frasier Sleeping after they stumbled upon the subreddit, the running theme throughout the community’s posts is that many, many more fans have been Frasier Sleeping for years or even decades before finding out that there are thousands of likeminded individuals whose only source of respite is reruns of TV’s snobbiest sitcom.
Ultimately, though, I just want to know what the Frasier Sleepers think of the reboot series — even the non-insomniacs seem to think these new episodes are total snoozers.
