I agree that Frasier and Niles weren’t supposed to be typical Seattleites. They were snooty people who happened to live in Seattle.
I remember an episode of Frasier where his dad got angry at Frasier’s snootiness and said that while Hester Crane had been a sophisticated woman she didn’t consider herself too good to have a beer and a burger now and then. I don’t think much was ever said about her family background, but it seems hers sons’ snootiness was not something they picked up entirely from her. It also seems unlikely that Martin would have married a woman as snooty as his sons. I doubt a lot of old money heiresses would have pursued careers as psychiatrists in the 1940s or '50s either, although it’s possible.
I remember that Frasier and Niles both went to a prestigious private school – there was an episode about a former classmate of theirs who’d been thrown out and had to go to public school – and continued on to Ivy League universities. Their snootiness may have been partially due to trying to fit in with their old money classmates.
IIRC, Niles’s wife Maris was old (or at least old-ish) money, as she was a lot wealthier than Niles and didn’t seem to have worked for it. Looking at Wikipedia I see that her family’s mansion was four generations old and that their money came from a urinal cake business.
For what it’s worth, Frasier was set in Seattle specifically because it’s across the country from Boston, where the character Frasier appeared in Cheers. I believe I heard that in some DVD commentary but wherever I heard it, it was direct from one of the show creators, who was explaining why he set it in Seattle.
He didn’t want an expectation that the cast of Cheers would appear, although most of them did eventually.
I don’t recall if he explained why Seattle over any other west coast city.
That’s exactly what I heard Fuzzy Dunlop, they wanted the Frasier character but not Cheers II. The fear of setting it somewhere close to Boston or even in Boston would be everyone would expect all the Cheers regulars to basically become Frasier regulars. Basically all of them got guest appearances on the show, but they were never significantly emphasized.
And yes, there was never a point in the entire run of Frasier where I felt the show was implying Niles and Frasier were the norm for Seattle. In fact, even in Cheers Frasier was the ridiculously snobby and effete character who was swilling beer with a bunch of blue collar slobs–he wasn’t portrayed as fitting in with his friends in Boston either.
Really, the show is about making fun of these snooty guys who are basically out of sync with the entire world. Within the cast, Daphne and Martin are portrayed best and are the most down to earth. Frasier is portrayed as too effete but still a lot more normal than Niles, and Niles is basically the over the top character that is mocked by everyone. They actually made Frasier a lot more pompous in Seattle than he was in Cheers, he starts out kind of aloof and professorial in Cheers, and always maintains some level of involvement in “fine culture” that sets him apart from the rest of the patrons but by the end of the series he had been a beer-swilling kinda guy for 4-5 years. In Seattle Frasier basically never drinks beer and looks down on his dad for drinking cheap domestic beer while Frasier and Niles only drink the most expensive wines.
Both Niles and Frasier were educated at Ivy League schools and one or both of them won Rhodes Scholarships and studied at Oxford, so my impression was coming from ordinary background they basically were striving to fit in with the very old money crowd they went to school with. Niles’ wife was genuinely part of Seattle old money she was suggested to be from a timber baron’s family but it was revealed near the end of the series it was a urinal cake business and Niles uses that information to resolve some issues with Maris through blackmail.
I’m sure there’s old money types anywhere in the United States, but yes the large number of “old moneyed” individuals they interact with on the show would have made more sense in a city like New York or Boston but the sample size of characters is small enough to be believable anywhere, you’re only talking a handful of people in a huge city.
I grew up out there, and there was a definite sense of Seattle trying to establish itself as a major-league city. (That’s figurative and literal, since they got a major league baseball team in '77.) Boeing was the only local company that seemed to make any kind of impact outside of the region. It still seems a little odd to me to see all the things that have come from there since; Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Amazon, grunge music, Eddie Bauer, and probably a few more if I thought about it. Oddly, Boeing moved its headquarters away some years ago.
On some civic level, there are still growing pains.
According to the information given in the show, Frazier Crane has just moved to Seattle as the series Frazier starts. He supposedly was born in Seattle. We’re told that his father was a policeman and his mother was a psychiatrist who sometimes worked for the police. He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. He was then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He returned to Harvard for his medical degree. (Niles, on the other hand, went to Yale and Cambridge.) As the series finishes, he’s moving to Chicago.
But to be honest though, the entire Cheers/Frazier universe was incredibly inconsistent about his background. Various stories are told about his childhood on Cheers which are then ignored or dismissed as lies when they come up on Frazier. I think it’s probably not worth the bother to understand the background of Frazier and Niles, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Thank you for this. Frasier is truly one of my all-time favorite shows. And I do remember that episode – was that when he took them to the steakhouse where the waitress cut off their ties? I felt so bad for Martin. How embarrassing!
I just want to emphasize that nobody writing Frasier was a native of Seattle. None of them were even slightly familiar with the geography. He’d consistently mispronounce the names of cities he was taking calls from, and half of the time those cities were out-of-range for a Seattle radio station anyway. (Although I guess they could handwave the latter by saying the radio station had affiliates… I don’t remember if that was ever mentioned.)
Interesting trivia: there was a TV commercial Kelsey Grammer made where he water-skiied behind a Washington State ferry. I remember being shocked at it because, while he was a major TV star at the time, the production value was really bad. I can’t remember the product it was advertising, and I’ve never been able to find the commercial on YouTube… alas.
I live about an hour outside of Seattle and only go there a couple times a year, but the part of the city I’ve seen I’d call anything but snooty. To the contrary, I often find myself going there to attend events that in my mind are “formal” affairs, and put on my best slacks, dress shirt, blazer, and ascot, only to find that I’m rubbing elbows with people wearing t-shirts and shorts. In the rain.
If I were to describe Seattle culture, the terms that would come to my mind are “hipster”, “cosmopolitan”, and “stubbornly independent”. Downtown Seattle is a place where you can find any kind of ethnic cuisine ever conceived of by man and still be less than half a mile from the nearest Starbucks, the kind of place where nobody will ever question the ridiculous getup you’re wearing, the kind of place where soccer games sell more tickets than football games (and for that matter, for about five years or so the stadium that hosts the Seahawks was selling Jones Cola instead of either Pepsi or Coke), and, since this past November, the kind of place where you can’t even walk from one end of a downtown shopping arcade to the other without at least five people trying to sell you marijuana.
Re: The Seattle freeze-I don’t live in Seattle, but just recently moved to a PNW town to the south. There is something different about the social culture, but it’s not exactly snootiness. It seems to me more like a quiet but very deep pride that can’t be understood by newcomers because they haven’t been here long enough to really get why it’s the best place on Earth.
People are extremely polite to each other, even if they don’t want anything from you and will never see you again, because it makes for a better community and that’s worth the effort of good manners. That courtesy is completely different from friendship though, it’s not a way to create relationships as much as just a way of being in the world, all the time, to everyone.
For someone from elsewhere, California for example, where people as a rule consider it rude or foolish to decline an invitation even from people they don’t like at all because you never know when you’ll need a favor, the innate kindness of Northwesterners can be confusing. For an introvert like me though, it’s fantastic. If I need social stimulation I can just take the bus down to my favorite coffee shop. Along the way I’ll have 14 really great conversations with total strangers and never have to worry that any of them will expect a dinner invitation next week.
It’s funny that you mention dinner invitations because that’s one of the things that struck me as so different between the cultures of CA and WA. In CA, if I invite you to dinner, you’ll either say yes or no and we know what’s going on. In WA, if a native accepts the invitation I can count on them to call me at least twice to confirm that I really meant to invite them over, that I haven’t changed my mind, and that really it’s not an intrusion. I have neighbors who have yet to see the inside of my house after 8 years.
Geez, people, just come on over already! Steak. Beer. Conversation. How complicated do you want to make it? :smack:
You don’t specify whether you’re talking about Seattle proper or the SoW in general. If the former, and you’ve lived there for more than a couple of months, you should be aware that nothing happens in Seattle unless it’s:[ul]
[li]Debated to death in every available forum;[/li][li]Voted on (preferably several times, with each result questioned);[/li][li]Challenged in court (again, preferably several times).[/li][/ul]If whatever-it-is survives all that, someone will find a grammar or spelling error in the original proposition, and the entire process starts again. Repeat ad infinitum (or perhaps ad nauseam).
I’m certainly not surprised any more. I’ve been up here a little more than a decade and like it quite a bit - I’m never going back to CA, that’s for sure. I’m even an introvert who’s not particularly fond of spontaneous social events, as a general rule… but sometimes, it’s nice to get some people together without the full production.
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So, are we having a DopeFest at dracoi’s house?
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PM me if you’re interested. There’s an open invite on July 4th. I live in unincorporated Snohomish county where we can launch all the fireworks we want.
We visited Seattle last year, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out where Frasier’s fictional apartment building might be. Despite being called “Elliott Bay Towers”, it seems to be placed somewhere around maybe Belltown / Queen Anne, judging by the view you see from his windows.
