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Speaking of Frasier
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Published Friday, October 13, 2023 @ 5:38 PM EDT
Oct 13 2023

Another iteration of the legendary sitcom Frasier debuted on Paramount+ this week. Think of it as Frasier: The Next Generation.

The show begins about 20 years after the original NBC series ended its run in 2004. I'll not bore you with the details of the new outing. Unlike the recent, uninspired Night Court revival, the first two episodes of Frasier (2023) manage to recapture the tone and ambience of its predecessor, even with the absence of most of the original ensemble cast. I'm optimistic about its potential, and there have been few shows as of late that have engendered that feeling.

Whether the current iteration can manage to equal its antecedent can't be determined at this point. There's a lot of new character development yet to be constructed, and beating the original's total of 37 Primetime Emmy Awards over its 11 season, 266 show legacy is mathematically impossible given how few episodes are produced for streaming services.

Anyway...

Though he might guest star at some point, the absence of David Hyde Pierce's Niles Crane character is certainly felt. Pierce won a well-deserved best supporting actor Emmy for this sixth season episode, directed by Kelsey Grammer. In a show noted for its sophisticated dialogue, Pierce knocks it out of the park with a display of pure physical comedy not seen since the likes of Jerry Lewis or Lucille Ball. Grammer's direction to Pierce was "I think that Niles, at no time, doubts that it's all going to work out just fine." Pierce said, "You don't play the panic. You solve each thing as it comes up. You let the audience see the crisis build and think, "You're in trouble, little man," while Niles goes about thinking, "Oh, I just need to solve this one little problem over here."

The cherry on top is Eddie, the show's wire-hair Jack Russell Terrier, who calmly watches as the pandemonium consuming Niles escalates, and the canine gets the last word, so to speak.

Clip - Frasier 0614 Three Valentines - Segment1(00 00 04.279-00 06 48.709) from plastic on Vimeo.


Categories: David Hyde Pierce, Frasier, Kelsey Grammer


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Quotes of the day: Carl Jung
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Published Friday, June 06, 2014 @ 12:00 AM EDT
Jun 06 2014

Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961), often referred to as C.G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A man who has never passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Beautiful bodies and beautiful personalities rarely go together.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.

One cannot live without inconsistency.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

Reason alone does not suffice.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

The healthy man does not torture others- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The inner voice is at once our greatest danger and an indispensable help.

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that fits all cases.

There's no coming to consciousness without pain.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

What you resist, persists.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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(Today is also the birthday of Thomas Mann.)

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"This is Dr. Niles Crane, filling in for my ailing brother, Dr. Frasier Crane. Although I feel perfectly qualified to fill Frasier's radio shoes, I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today."
-dialogue from "Frasier Crane's Day Off," written by James Burrows
Season 1, episode 23 of the NBC television series "Frasier"


Categories: Carl Jung, David Hyde Pierce, Frasier, James Burrows, Quotes of the day, YouTube


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