After Buffy, Angel, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Quantum Leap, 'Allo 'Allo, MASH, Father Ted, Due South, Fawlty Towers and Just Good Friends, there was just not anything else left on the shelf of the buy and exchange shop that i wanted to watch for hours on end. Then Frasier caught my eye.
I never really got into Cheers and was a latecomer to Frasier, must have been around about the third or fourth series that i began to watch it so being able to see the first few series that are completely new to me was quite a bonus.
It does have that mid-nineties feel to it and Kelsey Grammer plays his role very well but to me the star of the show is Niles played by David Hyde Pierce. What a great character, completely dwarfs Frasier.
Although Daphne often mentions that she is from Manchester, that accent sure isn't but i guess to an American ear it sounds English so that is close enough.
What i like about watching programmes that have since stopped is finding out what actors have done since and apart from Jane Leeves turning up on Have I Got News For You a few years ago when her Frasier career was coming to an end, i haven't seen any of them in anything else since.
What i do like about American series over the British is that a series comprises of 22 or 24 episodes while a British series is generally 6 episodes. Apparently the reason is that a British sitcom or drama is written by one or two people while the Americans have a team of writers on their shows so in the entire four series of Blackadder you get 24 shows which equals one series of Frasier.
David Hyde Pierce therefore joins James Marsters (Spike), Scott Bakula (Sam Beckett), Alan Alda (Hawkeye) and Paul Gross (Benton) in my list of actors that I thought deserved to go on and do more things but sadly faded out of sight after the end credits of the last show of the DVD box set.
2 comments:
I wouldn't say that Alan Alda faded out of sight. He's been in stuff like The West Wing, Canadian Bacon, at least a couple of Woody Allen films (which he was very good in) and I think he's also a regular on Broadway... nothing as well-known as M*A*S*H* admittedly, but what is?
I also think that quite a few of those US shows have gone on waaaaay too long, just phoning it in for the money, long after any sort of inspiration or originality has left town - The Simpsons probably being the classic example. The American Office is another - 10 x as long as the English one, but not even a quarter as good.
On the other hand, they could have made a few more series of The Wire and I wouldn't have complained :)
The only thing i can remember Alan Alda being in apart from MASH is a film about a couple who turn up at a holiday place each year. Maybe i have just never seen the other shows he has been in but if i did know, i probably would have watched them.
I am on series 6 with Frasier and it is obvious that the ideas are starting to run out and it went up to series 11. I am still hopeful that another Blackadder will appear and only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers was a travesty.
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