In its eleven seasons on NBC, the “Cheers” spin-off “Frasier” managed to largely be very completely different from its predecessor. The place “Cheers” largely happened in a sports activities bar in Boston, “Frasier” was as a lot in regards to the house lifetime of its eponymous psychiatrist, who moved throughout the nation to Seattle to host a call-in radio present and care for his aged father after a hip damage made it unimaginable for him to reside alone. When the present wasn’t going down in his palatial condominium or the radio station the place the present aired, Frasier and his much more effete brother Niles had been sipping espressos in a flowery Seattle espresso home.
It is true, after all, that quite a lot of the actors from “Cheers” confirmed up at numerous factors on “Frasier,” however typically only for single-episode drop-ins that felt as a lot about how completely different Frasier the individual was from them because it was about how completely different the present itself had grow to be. However there was a method by which the 2 exhibits had been very comparable certainly. On “Cheers,” a prolonged working gag concerned the truth that barfly Norm Peterson would typically discuss his spouse Vera, however nobody ever, y’know, noticed her. On “Frasier,” though Niles was extraordinarily completely different from Norm, he too had a spouse (Maris) that the viewers by no means as soon as laid eyes on. But when issues had shaken out otherwise, we might have met Maris — and the producers had a selected actress in thoughts.
Maris Crane was a supply of extraordinarily efficient comedy as early because the pilot episode of “Frasier,” and it is nearly too straightforward to simply spend time itemizing out the varied methods by which the character was described with out being seen. Frasier noting in an early episode that Maris is greatest preferred “from a distance. You already know, the best way you just like the solar. Maris is just like the solar … besides with out the heat.” We be taught that she’s the heiress to a urinal-cake fortune. We additionally know (courtesy of Niles’ cop dad Martin) that Maris is “skinny … very skinny. And Caucasian …very Caucasian.”
The variety of pleasant excuses for why Niles all the time spends time with Frasier with out his spouse within the early seasons had been all the time fairly sensible, from Niles recounting an expertise by which Maris requested for a goose close to an Italian soccer staff and “maybe inevitably, tragedy ensued” to him noting that she as soon as “slumped down on the mattress in her half-slip and sighed.” With these descriptions in thoughts, it is sensible that character actress Julia Duffy threw her hat within the ring early within the present’s run to play Maris.
The Final Time I Noticed Maris
In accordance to an enormous and engaging oral historical past of “Frasier” printed a couple of years in the past by Vainness Honest, one of many present’s creators famous that Duffy’s agent had contacted the present’s writers about having her seem as Maris. As Peter Casey remembers in that oral historical past, “Someplace within the first season, Julia Duffy’s agent … stated she’d like to play Maris. However by that time, we felt it was higher if she was left unseen. It was a lot funnier including new and outrageous descriptions.”
Casey is little question right; it is a testomony to the writing employees over the course of 11 seasons that they had been in a position to create such a vivid image of an individual we by no means noticed however felt we knew all too properly. However it’s additionally type of wild to think about the character of Maris and notice that, actually, Duffy would have been fairly near excellent as Maris in the event that they’d ever determined to place her onscreen.
Duffy, a TV stalwart because the Seventies, was greatest recognized on the time for having been an everyday on the CBS sitcom “Newhart” (the one by which the late comedian Bob Newhart runs a bed-and-breakfast, not the one by which he performed a psychiatrist himself). And who did Duffy play on “Newhart”? Oh, only a self-obsessed, haughty heiress whose cousin labored on the B&B. If something, you might say the casting could be too straightforward of a slam-dunk due to how well-known Duffy was (having netted a handful of Emmy nominations for her work on “Newhart”) and the way it might have nearly been typecasting.
It is not that Duffy could not have performed Maris; from a visible standpoint, few folks higher match the invoice. However simply because it was all the time funnier for the writers on “Cheers” to consider methods to explain Norm’s spouse Vera with out really exhibiting her too typically, it was so much funnier for the “Frasier” writers to consider new methods to maintain Maris off-screen, whether or not as a result of she refuses to go away her bed room, as a result of she’s in a hyperbaric chamber, or she’s dispatched her swordsman lover to take care of Niles as a substitute. In reality, “Frasier” really held the road higher than “Cheers.” The latter present technically did present us Vera throughout a season-five Thanksgiving episode that devolves right into a meals combat and climaxes with Vera being pied within the face simply as she enters the body.
It is good to know that somebody might have performed Maris Crane, after all, nevertheless it’s simply nearly as good to know that the present’s producers and writers by no means needed to put phrases into her mouth. Which may have been one problem too unimaginable to resolve.