Frasier: Complete First Season (1993)
Film:
DVD:

Created by David Angell, Peter Casey & David Lee
Starring Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, John Mahoney, Jane Leeves, Peri Gilpin & Moose as Eddie

Features:

• All 24 first season episodes
  
• Pilot episode running audio commentary by creators Casey & Lee
  
• Behind the Couch: The Making of Frasier
  
• Tour of Frasier's apartment
  
• Celebrity Voices
  

Released by: Paramount.
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format

My Advice: Fans of the show should own.

You might know Dr. Frasier Crane (Grammer) from the time he spent hanging out in a bar in Boston on some other show. But now, he's shed the marriage that didn't work out (with a returning Bebe Neuwirth) and moved back to his hometown of Seattle. He's gotten a job doing radio call-in psych work and all is well. Accepting the fact that his radio producer (Gilpin) makes a sport of keeping the highly intellectual Frasier in his place. Then of course, his brother, another Dr. Crane (Pierce), brings the bad news: their father (Mahoney) isn't in good enough shape to live on his own any more...he keeps falling over and hurting himself. Thus, Frasier takes his dad in and winds up getting a live-in assistant (Leeves) to help with his father. And just when Frasier thought it couldn't get any more complicated...there's Eddie (Moose).

Now, long time readers of this site know that I don't watch television. Other than Law and Order, the last show I watched on a regular basis was Hill Street Blues for God's sake. Just can't afford the time investment these things call for. And I know I miss out from time to time--and this show is apparently one of those times.

Witty as hell and yes, intellectual at most times even, I could never place why the few times I had seen an episode of this show--why it felt superior to the other comedies out there. Luckily, the making-of docu and the commentary provided me with the answer: it's a show that trusts its audience. You'll never see an establishing shot of the outside of the coffee shop, for example. As the creators put it, if you find the characters in the coffee shop, they trust their viewers enough for them to figure out, "Ah, they're in the coffee shop!" They also skip whole scenes that in a normal sitcom they'd throw in just to keep from confusing people, things that setup plotlines. Here they trust you, the viewer, to fill in the gaps. And I know if you're like me, you're asking yourself, "You mean this show is still on?"

Part of what makes the show work is the excellent writing, backed up with the equally solid casting. As the creators state on the disc(s), it was a bit of a departure to have both the Brothers Crane be cut from the same cloth. Your ordinary sitcom would have gone for opposites. But the razor-sharp wit of both, placed in the mouths of Grammer and Pierce is ridiculous. Mahoney is perfect at balancing crochety with endearing, Leeves does an equally impressive highwire act with goofy and endearing and Gilpin's Roz is just pretty straightforward caustic. And it all works.

Features are at least comparable with the Friends sets. The commentary with Casey and Lee coupled with the documentary give you pretty much, in a short amount of time, a wealth of info on the creation of the show. You get the story of what Frasier was initially going to be, the casting process (and how abnormally smooth it all went), and you get to talk with pretty much everybody involved. So that's choice. The tour of Frasier's apartment, while informative, comes at times in such short snippets that I wonder why they didn't just keep it running straight through instead of making you click on objects in the room to progress. Lastly, there are "Celebrity Voices" segments on each disc, which reveal who some of the callers to Frasier's radio show are.

For the fan of the show, this is a no-brainer. The video looks sharp, the sound is clear, and the features bolster it to a definite buy for them. Everyone else should at least rent the thing, as it's probably one of the most cerebral comedies to have hit television in a long time.