Why Frasier is one of the best—and gayest—sitcoms ever

I remember studying for GCSEs at sixteen, skimming through a textbook. It was either lent out by a teacher, or borrowed from a relatively barebones school library. There was a small box about queer theory. Not a chapter, not a subhead, not even a paragraph: just a tiny box of text. I can’t remember the other things that surrounded it. In this small box of text was a reference to Frasier, the long-running—and newly revived on streaming—sitcom about a snobbish, uptight radio psychiatrist, alongside his nearest and dearest. The small reference to Frasier referenced both the eponymous radio psychiatrist, and his even more tightly wound brother Niles. In this text box it was put forward that, because of the ways in which they adhere to certain queer stereotypes—a kind of cultural femininity being at the top of the list, as well as the failures that define so many of their (straight) romantic relationships—there’s room for a queer reading of Frasier. 

What makes this idea interesting isn’t so much the idea that either Frasier or Niles are queer. After all, the two of them are often driven through plots—and toward disaster—by their desire to be with women. From Frasier saying “how can men use sex to get what we want? Sex IS what we want,” to one of many examples of David Hyde Pierce enduring episode of tightly-wound frustration: “I DON’T CARE! NILES GOTTA HAVE IT!” Instead, the show creates a more complex relationship with queerness, trying to have it both ways by pandering to, and pushing up against, queer stereotyping. 

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There are handful of episodes throughout Frasier’s original run that deal with the idea of queerness; the first is in season two and the last, is in the season eleven (the last one before 2023’s revival.) As the queer breadcrumbs of Frasier are dropped throughout its duration, its relationship to stereotypes—and to the idea that one or both of the brothers might be queer in some capacity—evolves, as well as being a vehicle for some of the best comedy in the show’s run. 

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The first episode in the queer Frasier canon is “The Matchmaker,” from the second season. The plot is vintage, farcical Frasier, all misunderstanding and escalating insanity. The new manager at the radio station where Frasier works is under the (mistaken?) impression that Dr. Crane is gay. The irony is that it’s Frasier himself that creates this misunderstanding. When the penny finally drops for the beleaguered psychiatrist, he says to Niles “I simply asked if he was attached. Then we talked about the theatre and men’s fashion and… oh my god.” While Kelsey Grammar’s delivery is what makes this so funny, the thing that makes it interesting is that lingering relationship to gay stereotypes that both Frasier and his brother share. And as the queer Frasier canon develops, we see Dr. Crane reckoning with this idea himself down the line. 

At the beginning of “The Impossible Dream,” an episode from season four, Frasier wakes in a seedy motel, when out of the bathroom emerges Gill Chesterton, a colleague of Frasier’s who is, of course, queer coded. And at the core of this episode is what on the surface might be gay panic. There are plenty of jokes at the possibility that Frasier might be very deeply in the closet, but the episode ends up becoming something more introspective and compelling, where Frasier begins to consider if there might be some truth to what this dream is telling him. 

The most interesting relationship in the show has always been between Frasier and his father, Martin Crane (the late great John Mahoney.) Marty is the polar opposite of his sons: working class, unpretentious, and suffers no fools. “The Impossible Dream” sees both father and son grappling with something that they might have been ignoring for a long time. As Frasier himself puts it “I was sensitive as a child. Didn’t go in for sports. God, it’s every cliche in the book.” Frasier asks his father if it ever crossed his mind, if he thought that his eldest son might be gay. Marty puts this idea to bed in a way that only he could, but saying “if you were, you’d know by now. Your subconscious, or whatever you call it, could no more keep its trap shut than the rest of you.” The question that remains unanswered is how accepting Marty would be of his son if his subconscious did end up outing him.

The question of Frasier’s sexuality lingers after “The Impossible Dream” as well. In the end, he settles on the interpretation that the dream is presented as a puzzle because he’s not finding his radio show to be rewarding. And once he “solves” the puzzle, he expects the dream to pass by, having served its purpose. Instead, he returns to the hotel room, and is greeted by Sigmund Freud. The doctor congratulates him on working it out, before getting undressed and joining Frasier in bed. While this works as a punchline to cap off the episode, it also leaves the question of the title characters queerness unanswered. This kind of psychological cliffhanger is something that Frasier often deploys in a way that’s deft and moving; whether it’s at the end of “Chess Pains” —where Frasier and Marty constantly play chess and the former tries to work out why he can’t win—when the finally victorious son whispers to his sleeping father “I’m sorry I beat you, dad,” or when the show presents Frasier in the throes of a midlife crisis after winning a major award, telling assembled friends and colleagues: “thank you for honouring my life. I just wish I knew what to do with the rest of it.”

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But Frasier’s approach to queerness still works best when it embraces the show’s true comic roots: farce. So many episodes hinge on meticulously-timed slamming doors, and a mounting pile of deceptions and mistaken identities. Nowhere does this work best than “Out with Dad,” which might be the best episode of the entire show. Frasier drags Marty to the opera, so that he doesn’t seem like a loser going alone on Valentine’s Day (he also hopes to make a move on a woman he’s been admiring from afar.) As Marty himself puts it on the ridiculousness of opera (“the whole thing’s so unrealistic. Everybody’s in love and pretending to be somebody they’re not,”) his commentary becomes a shorthand for the episode itself. In order to let down a woman he meets at the interval easily, Marty pretends to be gay, which causes the object of Frasier’s affections to bring Edward, her (gay) uncle back to Frasier’s for a nightcap. 

Marty is given plenty of—ironically—outs to this situation, but whenever someone tries to help him with it, he ends up putting his foot in it and making things worse. When Frasier tries to convince his father of the crossed wires between himself and Edward, Marty thinks the concern is that everyone will think he’s too straight, so he plans to “gay it up a little,” by bringing out some stereotypical inflections and vocal tics.

As the show goes on, in the last installment of the queer Frasier canon, “The Doctor Is Out,” it finds itself grappling with the legacy of stereotypes that it’s been interrogating and leveraging – in these gay episodes that are never quite gay panic, in characters like Gill – for over a decade. While the A plot of Frasier being mistaken as gay by an opera director played by Patrick Stewart, seems like the way into this episode, it’s actually the B plot, involving a new boyfriend of Roz’s, that ends up being illuminating. When they first meet him, both Frasier and Niles assume that Roz’s new boyfriend Barry is gay: he describes the gym as his “church,” talks with a lisp, and there are plenty of jokes about closets. But as the episode unfolds, it becomes increasingly unclear about whether or not Barry is gay. As Roz puts it when Frasier tries and fails to track down Barry at a gay bar in Seattle, “do you know what he was doing from ten ‘till twelve last night? ME.” The episode acknowledges some of the ridiculous stereotypes around queer men. When Marty says you can tell he isn’t gay because of his muscles, Niles wryly adds “you’re right dad. And the second tip: no poodle.”

A show like Frasier will always have a complicated, layered relationship with queerness. From the push-and-pull relationship it has with stereotypes to the inside jokes that come from gay actors playing straight characters. Frasier always makes the snobbish brothers the butt of many of the jokes in the show, which becomes more thorny when the joke is “what if they’re gay?” Fortunately, these are never (just) played for laughs and, more often than not, the question of Frasier’s sexuality is left unanswered.

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