Kelsey Grammer Is Responsible for Frasier Abandoning His Son
While we all love his quick wit, snooty pretensions and proclivity for throwing wildly farcical dinner parties, when it comes down to it, Dr. Frasier Crane is still a deadbeat dad.
In the very first scene of the very first episode of Frasier, Dr. Crane explains to a caller (and to the TV audience at home) why he’s suddenly working as an AM radio psychiatrist in Seattle. It seems that, in the time since Cheers ended, his career had become “stagnate,” his marriage was over and his social life “consisted of hanging around a bar night after night.”
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So, craving a new start, Frasier packed his bags and moved back to his hometown of Seattle.
Which is a pretty messed-up decision to make, considering that Frasier had a small child at home. His son, Frederick, was born in the fall of 1989, which we know because it all transpired in an episode of Cheers. So that would mean that when Frasier decided to move across the country, Freddy was just three years old. Sure, Frasier saw Freddy intermittently over the course of the show, but he clearly wasn’t there for him in those crucial early years of his life.
Obviously, omitting the Freddy character from the spin-off gave the writers a lot more narrative freedom. After all, it would be tough for Frasier to host wine tastings, or go on erotically charged ski vacations, with a kid under 10 to look after. But this creative decision also gave the show an impossible thematic conundrum: Frasier is largely about the Crane boys reconnecting with their emotionally-distant father. Yet somehow Frasier doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to realize that he’s missing his own son’s childhood in the process?
Apparently, one of the determining factors in Freddy’s absence from Frasier was Kelsey Grammer himself. As recounted in Frasier by Jefferson Graham, the “official” companion to the series (accept no substitutes), the idea of a Cheers spin-off starring both Frasier and Lilith wasn’t a possibility because Bebe Neuwirth wanted to focus on her stage career. But Grammer still wanted to go for it, telling producers: “This is my shot. I’ve worked for it for a long time.”
He was reportedly “adamant,” though, that Freddy not be a weekly fixture on the show. Why? Because kids get too much attention.
“Frankly, any show that has a child who is growing up, by definition, becomes the focus of the show,” Grammer told Graham. “I knew the name of the show was Frasier, and I wanted it to stay that way.”
Ironically, despite his best efforts to not be upstaged by a child, Grammer was still ultimately overshadowed by his canine co-star Moose, who played Eddie.
