I Can’t Stop Watching <em>Frasier. </em>I Can’t Stop Thinking About Maris.
Frasier, you might have heard, has been enjoying a renaissance. That’s partly for logistical reasons—the NBC sitcom has been streaming on Netflix, introducing its antics to a new generation of viewers—but also for artistic ones: Despite its mid-’90s vintage, the show is extremely well calibrated to this moment. The misadventures of Frasier Crane, a talk-radio psychiatrist, are soothing. The show’s rhythms are soft and soporific. Frasier combines theatrical absurdity with earnest emotion. Its anxieties are slight, its stakes low. “Frasier,” The Ringer’s Kate Knibbs wrote in 2017, “is neither aspirational nor relevant, but rather pleasantly restorative—the modern binge-viewing equivalent of a much-needed bath.”
, tragically, is leaving Netflix at the end of December, and I’ve been watching a lot of the show before it makes its departure from the platform. As I get in those views, I keep getting distracted by a character who isn’t there: Maris. Niles’s wife is technically part of the Crane family. But she is definitely not, in the show’s estimation, a real member of the Crane family. You know that primarily because Maris spends all 11 seasons of invisible to viewers. In the manner of Mrs. Wolowitz in , Peggy’s mother in , and Vera in , Maris is often talked about but never seen.
