I know Frasier and Niles are considered outliers in the show Frasier but in general is Seattle considered a snooty city by comparison with other US cities? Or was the placing of the show in that city meant to be ironic?
Seattle is known for environmental, avant garde, and hipster snootiness. But not so much for the high brow snootiness of Frasier and Niles, though there are intersections of interests.
I’ve never noticed the phenomenon, but then I’m an introverted native (of the region, not Seattle proper). My personal take on one possible cause: the area grew so fast, in a period where social norms were changing radically anyway, that it was difficult-to-impossible to keep track. So people kind of gave up.
Now pardon me, but could you move back a bit? You’re too close to my personal bubble.
It’s a very laid-back town, actually. People dress as casually as they can get away with in a particular setting, and people generally use first names in every situation.
But we are kind of reserved. People from other places often think we’re unfriendly. I think we actually just don’t want to force ourselves on others, somewhat to a fault.
There are also a lot of intellectuals. People read a lot here, and it seems like everyone has or is working on an advanced degree.
a data point:
Seattle is the home of Starbucks, the inventor of snooty coffee culture.
I’d second this.
Frasier and Niles are what I’d call “old money” snooty and you won’t find that out here in Seattle. Maybe not anywhere on the West Coast of the US.
We’re the kind of people who wear old jeans while we talk about how our $10 cup of coffee came from a particular village of politically correct farmers and is served in locally sourced, recycled, biodegradable cups. (OK, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration… but if you’ve lived here, you know at least one person like that.)
PS: The people who wrote Frasier don’t know all that much about Seattle, especially the weather. We get plenty of rain here, but rarely in heavy storms and never with lightning. We don’t even bother with umbrellas because you can just walk around in the drizzle.
Yeah, I think this is a good description. If there are Frasier-like people, I sure don’t know them.
There is an “old money” section of Seattle, but they traditionally keep a low profile; a legacy of the kidnapping of George Weyerhauser way back in 1935.
The inability to commit to friendship is a West Coast-wide syndrome, not just Seattle. But the reserved nature of the area, IMHO, having lived there as a working class person, is due to the conflict the culture has with America’s already unacknowled class rifts, and the PNW’s purported Liberalism. They like to think themselves egalitarians, but it’s simple human nature for people to a kid social contact with others who have significantly less money than themselves.
If anyone remembers the old “Almost Live” sketch comedy show from the 80’s & 90’s, they did an ongoing takeoff of “Cops,” in Seattle’s various suburbs and satellite towns. For Seattle, it was lighthearted joshing of how those yuppies ordered elaborate coffee. For the working class towns it was mean spirited bashing of those others: ignoramouses who never removed their ballcaps. You might as well be dead than live in Yelm.
As I remember it there, the other working class people I met had open and relaxed manners. But the professional-class, locally-rooted people were unnecessarily standoffish: perhaps because so many of them were one generation away from their Boeing factory worker parents and grandparents.
If anyone here is a professional-class transplant, I’d be curious to know how you were treated by the local professionals.
Hmm. I never watched the show enough to realize it’s set in Seattle, and considering it’s a Cheers spinoff, assumed they were supposed to be in Cambridge.
Bit of clarification for this Seattleite, s’il vous plait: Who wants to know?
The Space Needle was in the show’s logo and every episode really harped on the Seattle-ness. Not to mention it was raining in every episode.
The lawyers who were born here are just as nice as the imports (like me). In fact, the NW bred lawyers are more reasonable to work with and against than the big shots from the East Coast who tend to work at the big asshole firms.
Seriously, folks…if there’s anything to the notion, it’s the result of a classic inferiority complex.
Rough-edged, stump-choked, gold rush boomtown just a blink of the historical eye ago (we gave the world the expression “Skid Row” y’know, a corruption of “Skid Road”–today Yesler Way–down which the timber barons used to slide their logs to waterfront mills), Seattle suffered many affronts as it clawed its way to respectability (famed British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, over here on a sort of symphonic lend-lease program during WWII, famously referred to Seattle as “a cultural dustbin”).
A slightly more recent example that still rankles old timers such as myself was David Brinkley’s hour-long TV put-down way back in 1962: imagine those lumber-wrangling hicks thinking they can pull off a World’s Fair! Well, Mr. East Coast Elitist, not only was OUR World’s Fair WAY more successful than YOUR New York World’s Fair two years later, but it left us with the Space Needle, world-class opera and ballet companies, art museums and…oops.
Disturbing how natural it seems to get snootily defensive about The Emerald City–still!
Seattle was also mentioned at the beginning of every episode when Frasier took his on-air callers’ questions. And the skyline view out Frasier’s condo picture window was always on display.
I thought Frasier and Niles were “new money”? Bought their own furniture and all that?
Yep, their father was a Seattle cop. They just acted like old money.
But as I recall they both were more like their mother, Hester, who was also a psychiatrist. Perhaps, she was from old money…
Alan Clark, an engaging British politician of the Thatcher era, delighted in dismissing nouveau riche with that phrase. Which seemed odd to some since his father may have been Sir Kenneth Clark the art historian who bought the family castle, but the wealth came from making cotton reels.
Al Clark today is chiefly remembered for his military history, but more so for having slept with both a mother and her daughter. Respect !
Frasier and his brother are not supposed to be depicted as typical Seattleites. Seattleites are very NOT snooty, you should see some of the slobs around here. There is a lot of coffee wankery and organic food things that we do in fact follow more than the norm that get depicted as snooty, but when interacting with others, snobbishness is the last thing I would use to describe the people here.
Native Chicagoan, have lived off and on in Seattle and surrounding areas around 15 years.