The Good
This show is brimming with comic wit and substance.
The Bad
No extra features. Some plots were a tad hokey.
Frasier: The Complete Ninth Season sees Seattle’s favorite radio psychiatrist create a lot of laughs with his friends. Frasier’s (Kelsey Grammer) supporting team includes father Martin (John Mahoney), brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Daphne (Jane Leeves) and Roz (Peri Gilpin). They all serve to create the kind of comic banter that we have loved in sitcoms for generations. In this, the Ninth Season of this show (it only went off the air in 2004), Frasier o broadcast, his father becomes a night-watchmen, and Niles has his own problems (mainly with Daphne). At all times this show seems to be striving to put intelligent humor on the air and what is so impressive is how often it succeeds in its goal.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
While this show is tonally different than Cheers, what makes it so similar is the strength of the supporting cast. Kelsey Grammer is certainly a potent enough performer to carry this show, but like Cheers (which didn’t totally rely on Ted Danson), it plays the other characters off him with the right degree of timing so we don’t even realize who the real star of a given episode is. By not focusing so much on Frasier and letting Martin, Niles, Daphne and all the others have room to breath, that probably accounts for why this show had as lengthy a run as it did. People came to care about these characters so that they didn’t even care about who or what it was focusing on. As long as Frasier was on the air that was enough.
And on the air it was…
Features
No Extra Features came with this release.
Video
Full Screen Format. These shows looked a lot better than some of the stuff that Paramount has in their vaults. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anybody because the show isn’t that old. For reasons I can’t understand, Paramount seems to be able to compress the newer shows in much better ways than they do their older ones. I didn’t see any examples of the picture being overly baked or it getting pixilated in parts, but that isn’t something I ever notice on their DVDs. Sometimes the older shows seem a little fuzzy around the edges of the characters, or there’s a lot of hits in a row on the picture (it might just be video dust). On Frasier: The Complete Ninth Season everything looked a few notches below pristine but still quite good.
Audio
Dolby Digital - English Stereo Surround. Sound for these DVDs was great, There are four discs in this set and they sounded really good. As I mentioned in my Wings review, I find the writing for these shows to be so good (it makes sense because they employed the same writers) that I am happy just listening to the back and forth between these characters. Frasier doesn’t seem to be as quickly paced (joke after joke) as Cheers, but I think I only noticed that because its what I was initially expecting from this show.
Package
With a purple background focusing on the Seattle skyline, the cast of Frasier and the show’s faithful dog are featured on the front of this slipcase cover. The back has more of that purple background (minus the skyline), the pictures from the show, a description of what Frasier: The Complete Ninth Season is about, a listing of what episodes are on which discs and some technical specs. The packaging pulls out in one piece featuring more artwork from the show. This is a little bulky for a Paramount release but perhaps this project was in production before the company started putting all their releases in clear, amaray cases?
Final Word
I was a huge Cheers fan but I really never watched Frasier. In fact, I started off watching Cheers and then I really didn’t get caught back up with it until a few years ago when I started watching a lot more TV Land. I have heard about the characters on Frasier, but what really made me want to watch this show was the fact that I really enjoyed this character on Cheers. Sadly, I went in expecting to see a carbon copy of that character, not realizing that he was actually different here.
Sure, Frasier is still sharp witted and filled with his intelligent witticisms, but its different now. This is his show so (nine seasons in) he isn’t so neurotic. He has problems but they seem to affect him differently and as a result of this he reacts differently. Brought to us by some of the same people who gave the world Cheers and Wings, its not surprising that all three shows had the successful runs that they did.
