When “Cheers” ended in 1992, the original plan wasn’t for Kelsey Grammer to get his own Frasier Crane spin-off. Instead, “Cheers” writers David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee developed a show about a paralyzed millionaire to be played by Grammer, but were quickly turned away by NBC. The network then advised the writing trio to further develop the character of Frasier Crane, and thus “Frasier” as we know it was born.
Except, there was a little more to it than that. It’s all well and good to take a beloved “Cheers” character and give him a spin-off, but since the majority of Dr. Crane’s time on that original series was spent in the titular bar, the actual premise of his spin-off was not immediately obvious. What’s more, the show’s producers had a big concern about Grammer when “Frasier” first started. The character was a tad more buffoonish on “Cheers” than he ended up being on his spin-off, and at the time Angell, Casey, and Lee were unclear on how to translate Frasier from a member of the ensemble to a leading man.
Interestingly enough, the idea that eventually kick-started Frasier’s own series came not from completely abandoning his “Cheers” origin. Rather, it came from embracing an unused storyline from that beloved sitcom and melding it with a real-life example.
The unused Cheers storyline that birthed Frasier
David Hyde Pierce thought the “Frasier” pilot was terrible at first, mainly because the show appeared to have two of the same characters in Frasier and his brother, Niles. But it didn’t take long for Pierce to come around, as the series basically arrived fully formed. That pilot, titled “The Good Son,” was remarkable for the way in which it established the “Frasier” magic right off the bat, especially when compared to the many other shows that take a while to dial in all the dynamics.
Getting to that point, however, took some work. In an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, “Frasier” co-creator David Lee spoke about how the show went through several iterations before he, David Angell, and Peter Casey landed on a discarded storyline from their “Cheers” days as the basis of the “Frasier” spin-off. As Lee explained it:
“We remembered that on ‘Cheers’ we’d been trying for years to do an idea that we had which was where Frasier had taken a job as a radio psychologist, an on-air guy who solved problems. We could never break the story on ‘Cheers,’ but we started thinking about that again, and so we started putting together a show where Frasier was going to be a radio psychologist.”
That unused storyline idea proved to be the spark required to get the “Frasier” machine moving. But that was just part of the process.
Frasier was partly based on a real radio psychiatrist
Once David Lee, Peter Casey, and David Angell had their premise, courtesy of a leftover “Cheers” idea, they decided they needed some real-world experience from radio psychiatrists. So, as Lee explained to the Television Academy Foundation, the group visited KABC in Los Angeles to watch a on-air personality Dr. David Viscott. As Lee recalled:
“We went down to KABC here in Los Angeles and looked at — the guy’s now since passed away — Dr. David Viscott. He used to be a radio psychologist here in the LA area and we watched his program.”
Interestingly enough, Lee claimed that Dr. Viscott was “really weird,” though he didn’t elaborate on why. The psychiatrist, who the Los Angeles Times dubbed one of the “pioneers of on-the-air counseling,” began hosting his KABC talk show in 1980 and remained on-air until 1993, the year “Frasier” debuted. Interestingly enough, during a DVD commentary track for the “Simpsons” episode “There’s No Disgrace Like Home,” Matt Groening revealed that Viscott was also partly the inspiration for the show’s counselor character, Dr. Marvin Monroe.
For Lee, Angell, and Casey, Viscott’s show gave them an insight into how a real radio show works, allowing them to write Frasier as a much more believable on-air shrink. Lee summed up the KABC visit by saying, “We just got a feel like, ‘Okay there’s the producer, okay, there’s another character and there’s other people in other shows sort of wandering around the periphery.'” In that visit to an LA radio station, then, lay the origins of not only the leading man version of Frasier, but also all the now beloved characters that populated Seattle’s KACL talk radio in “Frasier.”