The Eerie Familiarity of Frasier (2023)

New Frasier.. like the Old Frasier

As with new Beavis and Butt-Head, which I’ve written about previously, Paramount+ includes access to new Frasier, a return of the vainglorious pratfalling public psychiatrist to the small screen after the original series ended in 2004.

Though Frasier himself has returned, none of the supporting characters have. Instead he’s surrounded by an entirely (apparently) new cast of supporting characters, and the series is set in a brand new (but also very old) location. Given this, we might expect Frasier (2023) to feel very different to Frasier (1993)…

But it doesn’t. It feels eerily familiar. Despite almost everything, apart from the title character, being different, Frasier (2023) somehow feels largely the same as Frasier (1993).

The aim of this post is to try to think through why, with New Frasier, despite almost everything being different, almost everything is also the same.

Characters: The Situation in Situation Comedies

Commercially successful TV series, back in the 1990s, weren’t really meant to go anywhere in terms of character and characterisation. Whereas Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, which countless films use as their narrative template, focuses on how a sequence of events and experiences lead to irreconcilable change in the central character, the formula for a successful TV series depends on the central character not changing. Things happen to the central character, but like a boulder in a stream, the central character ultimately remains largely unchanged and unmoved as a result. The reason for this was largely due to the value to an audience of familiarity, which brings a sense of warmth to characters, and also not to burn through an ultimately finite supply of Heroic Fuel: There’s only so many times a character can face adversity, the call to adventure, the descent into the Underworld, look one’s Adversary in the eyes, almost die (literally or figuratively), ultimately triumph, and return to the light wounded, wiser but ultimately stronger. For an episodic series, if a character is shown to be broken and remoulded every week, before too long the audience will start to feel they’re made more of clay than flesh and bone.

So if the Monomyth can’t be used as the main narrative engine of a TV series, what can? For sitcoms, the clue’s partially in the name: the situation. And for most successful sitcoms, including Frasier, much of the situation comes from the interplay between characters.

How did this work in Frasier (1993)? Well, in the original Frasier the following supporting characters were introduced:

• Marty. Frasier’s father, a retired police officer. Whereas Frasier is booksmart, Marty is streetsmart. Frasier and Marty are both smart, but orientated towards fundamentally different forms of knowledge and competence. They might be related, but they’ve always swum in different waters.
• Niles. Frasier’s brother. Whereas Marty is too dissimilar to Frasier, Niles is too similar. Frasier’s knowledge and interests are esoteric, high culture not mainstream, and so there are few people in the world who will understand him. Niles does. But their world of high culture is so exclusive it’s also small. And it’s competitive, their academic and professional overachievement fueled by unquensionable egotism and self doubt. So, as well as Niles being Frasier’s closest friend, he’s also his closest rival.
• Ros. Frasier’s Radio producer. Like Marty she’s streetsmart (albeit in the ‘streets’ of media production). And like Frasier she’s competitive. Because she’s more worldly wise than Frasier, and his boss, she exploits and manipulates Frasier to achieve her own ambitions, which often don’t align exactly with his own. She is, in a platonic sense, Frasier’s pimp.
• Daphne. The Help. Marty’s live-in carer, launderer and folder of clothes, cooker of foods, provider of basic needs. Daphne is economically dependent on Frasier’s largesse, and appears to be somewhat naive. However this appearance of naivity is sometimes shown to be an illusion.

Whereas in Frasier (2023) there are the following supporting characters:

• Freddy. Frasier’s son, a working firefighter. Whereas Frasier is only booksmart, Freddy is also streetsmart. Freddy actively rejected the path to high culture that Frasier set him on. They might be related, but they swim in different waters.
• Alan. Frasier’s university buddy. Whereas Freddy is too dissimilar to Frasier, Alan is too similar. Frasier’s knowledge and interests are estoteric, high culture not mainstream, and so there are few people in the world who will understand him. Alan does. But their world of high culture is so exclusive it’s also small. And it’s competitive. Alan, however, has tenure, something Frasier covets, so in this sense, as well as being Fraiser’s closest friend Alan is, if not exactly a rival, someone Frasier finds himself measuring himself against, and finding wanting.¹
• Olivia. Frasier’s boss. As well as being an academic, she’s also a manager of academics, and so a practitioner of the Dark Arts of academic self promotion. Like Frasier she’s competitive, especially with her sister, who’s also a senior academic. She is, in a platonic sense, Frasier’s pimp, and calls him her ‘dancing bear’.
• Eve. Not The Help, but a single mother Freddy helped, and so Frasier must support too. Eve is somewhat economically dependent on Frasier’s largesse, living rent-free in one of his apartments. She has good social instincts and works at a bar, but considers herself an actor, though has a naively delusional sense of her own abilities in this field.

If the second series of descriptions seems similar to the first, this may help explain how and why Frasier (2023) is eerily familiar to viewers of Frasier (1993). Despite some differences, there is almost a one-to-one mapping between the main supporting characters in both Frasiers.² Though it might not declare itself as such, Frasier (2023) is not just a sitcom, but a sci-fi sitcom, as it appears, like an inversion of Dr Who, that everyone except the lead character has regenerated into a new body.

Character-based situational combinations

So, Frasier (2023) takes the same supporting character archetypes as Frasier (1993) and regenerates them. Why? I think this is because of the way even a small number of supporting characters can generate a large number of character-based situational combinations, and so a great deal of fuel for episodic stories, each based on how the main character interacts with one, two, or possibly three of the other characters. The Wikipedia article on Combination goes into a painful amount of detail on this.

Say there are four primary characters supporting characters. ³ There are then four ways (F, A, O and E) that a single supporting character can interact with the main character. This comes intuitively, but also from the Binomial Coefficient \(C(n, k) = \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!}\), where \(!\) indicates factorial. We can work out the total number of combinations of four characters as follows:

Code

library(tidyverse)
my_binomial <- function(n,k) {factorial(n) / (factorial(k) * factorial(n-k))}

n_characters <- 4

df <- tibble(
    n_characters_interacting = 0:4
    ) |>
    mutate(
        n_comb_with_this_many_chars = map_int(n_characters_interacting, function(x) my_binomial(n_characters, x))
    ) |>
    mutate(
        cumulative_combinations = cumsum(n_comb_with_this_many_chars)
    )

df 

# A tibble: 5 × 3
  n_characters_interacting n_comb_with_this_many_chars cumulative_combinations
                     <int>                       <int>                   <int>
1                        0                           1                       1
2                        1                           4                       5
3                        2                           6                      11
4                        3                           4                      15
5                        4                           1                      16

So, with 4 supporting characters, there are 16 combinations of interactions with Frasier (where 0 characters interacting would be Frasier soliloquizing, say if he gets stuck in a lift). This isn’t a huge number of situations, but more than a modern season. But this is just combinations, not permutations: a situation in which Alan verbs Olivia, for example, would be different to one in which Olivia verbs Alan, but in combinatorials counted as the same.⁴ It also excludes any B plots not involving Frasier. For this we simply need to change the n in the above from 4 to 5, and exclude k=0 from the option, as a story involving no characters probably wouldn’t work…

Code

n_characters <- 5

df <- tibble(
    n_characters_interacting = 1:5
    ) |>
    mutate(
        n_comb_with_this_many_chars = map_int(n_characters_interacting, function(x) my_binomial(n_characters, x))
    ) |>
    mutate(
        cumulative_combinations = cumsum(n_comb_with_this_many_chars)
    )

df 

# A tibble: 5 × 3
  n_characters_interacting n_comb_with_this_many_chars cumulative_combinations
                     <int>                       <int>                   <int>
1                        1                           5                       5
2                        2                          10                      15
3                        3                          10                      25
4                        4                           5                      30
5                        5                           1                      31

Allowing Frasier not to be in every story, the number of character-based combinations increases to 31, which seems plenty of basic story types from which between 5 (one scene) and 30 (one show) minutes of content could be derived. And as mentioned, this is just combinations, not permutations, where order matters. If looking at permutations, then the number of sequences with five characters is \(5!\),⁵ or 120, but we also need to include four, three, and two character sequences too, ie. \(5! + 4! + 3! + 2!\), which brings up the number of permutations to 152.⁶

So what?

Okay, I’ve gone into the technical details a bit more than I was expecting to. The point is that even with a fairly small number of characters, the number of possible situations and circumstances that derive entirely from placing characters in a room together, and thinking how they might interact with each other, quickly becomes large enough to avoid being repetitive despite being familiar. Of course, additional supporting characters, guest stars, and scenarios all help increase the number of stories even further, but just having a small number of well defined characters, and imagining the narrative molecules and compounds these character elements may form when forced to mix, appears to do the bulk of the storytelling. With a sitcom, with interesting and well defined characters, in a sense it seems the stories write themselves.

And why almost the same characters, rather than just the same number of characters? I think this was because over a decade of Frasier provides plenty of experience about what these character combinations produce. So, why start from scratch?⁷

Conclusion

I think a second season is likely.

Footnotes

1. Being an English character played by an English actor (Unlike Freddy and Olivia, who are both American characters played by English actors), Alan’s character is also a poorly dressed high functioning alcoholic.

2. The one exception to this is David Crane, son of Niles and Daphne. Initially it appeared the ‘Niles’ archetype from Frasier-1 had undergone some kind of Narrative Fission Event and been split into both Alan and David. On further viewing, however, it becomes apparent David is instead an intruder from another show, being effectively a toned down version of Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, and being more a caricuture than a character.

3. I’m excluding David as a primary supporting character as he appears to be a caricature, but he may become more fleshed out over time.

4. Situations best described using intransitive verbs are probably closer to combinatorials not permutations. A pizza with ham and mushroom would be much like a pizza with mushroom and ham. Similarly a plot in which Alan and Olivia eat dinner together would be much like a plot in which Oliva and Alan eat dinner together. However a situation in which Alan invites Olivia to dinner would be different to a situation in which Olivia invites Alan to dinner!

5. factorial(5) in R

6. factorial(5) + factorial(4) + factorial(3) + factorial(2) in R

7. As with the phrase “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme”, we probably shouldn’t assume exactly the same plots will occur in Frasier 2023 as with Frasier 1993. If it were to, we would expect Alan, who’s in his sixties, to become emphatuated with Eve, who’s in her twenties. I suspect this won’t happen, unless there’s a reboot of the reboot in 20 more years featuring Leonardo Dicaprio