One of the pleasures of Seinfeld was its persistent probing of the frontiers between its characters' private interests and their public faces—what they wanted and what they wanted to be seen to want. So when the policewoman Jerry is dating refers to Melrose Place, Jerry feigns ignorance, until she connects him to a polygraph and he cracks like hammered plaster.
I feel that way sometimes about my obsessions with two other sitcoms. I've already admitted the guilty pleasure in these pages, so there's no need to rip away the wires and flee, loosing my locked-away frustrations about knotty plot lines in the process. Seinfeld, that consummate canvass of 90s' urban adulthood, has been gone six years, and the attempts of its stars to exploit its charms have all fizzled. This month, as only the comatose are unaware, its two former Thursday-night mates, Friends and Frasier, follow it into the oblivion of syndication.
Historians point to political events, but in some ways the runs of popular network shows mark contemporary periods of social time more tidily. The Dick Van Dyke Show tells us more about early-'60s America—freed from the '50s, hesitantly postmodern (a TV show about writing a TV show) but still buttoned-down and a little corny—than any analysis of the Bay of Pigs or the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps we can peg the public mind in presidential administrations, but the ages of its soul are set by the spans of sitcoms and dramas.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Laugh-In; M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show—these pairs might not tell us much about their chunks of the '60s and '70s, but they say something about the mind-sets of the people slouched before their TV sets. Even the wisest and edgiest network shows are at heart tame and safe, but the variety of tame and safe preferred during a period speaks volumes about it.
The roughly overlapping runs of Friends and Frasier mark the maturing of two age cohorts in millennial America, with the latter, in a sense, picking up where the former ends. Frasier returning to Seattle after is early-adult, Beantown hijinks parallels the movings-on of the Friends. Each show traded a bar for a coffee shop in which to play out the anxieties of its demi-generation. One progressed from its 20s into its 30s, with the other a decade ahead, when the quest for emotional security turns more desperate.
And if we've clung to each a little too long, perhaps it's because we miss those pre-lapsarian days of swelling portfolios and small-scale, distant terrorism.
I'm not sure what the roughly overlapping eras of Friends and Frasier tell us about millennial America—perhaps they represent a longing for those pre-lapsarian days of swelling portfolios and small-scale, distant terrorism. Certainly all of the key characters in both sitcoms are getting a little long-of-tooth for their youthful shenanigans, although Frasier, at least, has shown its title character wary of time's winged chariot. Unlike his Seinfeld counterpart, he dates women roughly his own age, and it's been rewarding to follow encounters with gifted certain-agers such as Patricia Clarkson and Laura Linney.
I am of that cohort, but that's not why I've stayed tuned to the show. I recall being aware 10 years ago, seeing the promos for its debut, that Friends was going to be about the travails of people younger than me, which allowed me to indulge an indifference that was more satisfying then than it is now. But in its third or fourth week, I condescended to watch—like I had something better to do—and got hooked. Again, age had nothing to do with it. Both Friends and Frasier have kept me on the line with their writing.
At its best, Frasier recalled the great screwball comedies of the '30s—Grant and Hepburn, Powell and Loy—with a dash of I Love Lucy. Mistaken-identity escapades, killer stuff since Shakespeare, have been its mainstay. Martin and Niles pretending to be a May-September gay couple to sustain a Frasier dating ploy should be seated in sitcom Valhalla, along with the celebrated "Chuckles the Clown" episode from Mary Tyler Moore. But Frasier also has sported sparkling throwaway lines, like the wine-club invocation, sung to Rule Britannia: "Hail cork master/ the master of the cork/ He knows which wine goes best/ With fish or pork."
The pretensions of the Crane boys have grown tiresome at times, but their pomposity has always been punctured by the show's smart scripts. Similarly, the Friends characters would have worn thin long before Ross and Rachel got together for the second or eighth time. Each of the characters is enervating to one degree or another, but the crackling dialogue saves them.
Their soapy "relationship" machinations have always seemed as ridiculous as the idea that six people would progress well into their 30s unwaveringly in each other's company every day of life. Frankly, I can't work up much interest in whether or not Ross and Rachel ultimately unite. (I've long pulled for the return of Emily, played by the talented Brit Helen Baxendale, but that's a long shot.) In any event, the writers have made the most ludicrous plot twists at least forgivably hilarious.
Few scripted programs on broadcast TV have the promise of the departing F's. Scrubs, maybe? In our fragmented entertainment universe, cable has the sharp shows, while the networks are determined to claim the watercooler with fabricated "reality." It appears the postmillennial era has marginalized sharp writing to cable connoisseurship.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.