Behind the Frasier Video

Hey gang!

Back with another behind the scenes overview on how the latest video came together. This time we’re looking at the extremely troubled production process on my two and a bit hour long Frasier video, which very nearly didn’t work at all. Very funny given I said this wouldn’t be as technical as the last video in my previous behind the scenes post. Ah well. Read on!

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A History of Frasier on Cheers

The idea

 Since I started, I knew I wanted to do a Frasier video.

 It’s not an exaggeration when I say I love this guy. I saw him by chance on tv in a hotel in New York, aged 11, and my parents explained it was a show they had already watched and loved, having grown up with Cheers as well. I watched, I came back home to England and kept watching, and slowly realised this person was so incredibly close to what I already saw myself as compared to my class-mates, explaining why my folks had been fans, too. This was the Sondheim/operetta loving, self destructive, pompous copy of all my existing traits as an odd, outsider teenager on the screen, and it got to the point where the friends I made much later in life would watch the show and turn to each other and say ‘oh my god, it’s /just/ Will’.

 So it was inevitable I’d eventually get to him. You’ve seen me make constant cutaways and references to him in my other videos, or talk about the talents involved when discussing other projects, or probably, if you were ever aware of him already, felt the vibes coming through me talking on and on about stuff anyway. It was never a question of if, only when, but I was never sure exactly how to do it.

 When I make a video on a subject, especially something already quite popular or well-discussed, I like to pick a particular angle, something I think will make for a specifically interesting video, to try to push myself and stand apart from the competition. It’s worth remembering when I started doing this kind of thing a lot less people were talking about every subject under the sun- so when I did an hour long piece on Hill Street Blues, nobody else was even close to doing old ass tv retrospectives, and the audience who remembered it weren’t really scouring YouTube for this kind of stuff. But, now that everyone’s doing video essays on everything, and more people of different generations are accessing YouTube, I’ve noticed those topics start to appear with increased viewership, things i thought only I would ever cover, including Frasier and Cheers, which both got the big video essay treatment (with nearly 800k views each, blimey.)

 In a way this wasn’t so bad. I was miffed to not be the first video essayist to do a big piece on my favourite character, but when it came to Cheers- a show I really love - I knew I only really wanted to talk about Frasier, knowing where his future went. And then it occurred to me that this still hadn’t really been dealt with. This other person who made these videos had discussed the shows, but hadn’t really gotten into the nitty gritty of analysing the character dynamics outside of their cultural contexts or the effect of the writing (in truth, I’m not a fan of what they created, for oh so many reasons) and I decided there might be room for me to offer something to the discussion after all.

 I had also heard a revival was taking place, after years of rumours and talks with 2022 finally seeing some confirmation. So, when I began my roadmap, I decided to make Frasier a high priority to tackle, and wouldn’t you know it, this year they started talking about its debut, with the trailer dropping halfway through my progress. By that point, I knew I had until October 12th to really hit peak Frasier interest- because if that show sucked, it very well might taint the conversation.

Time was of the essence.

Planning

 Now, I’d already watched both shows in their entirety over the years and knew Frasier off by heart, to the point where I can remember which scenes happened in which seasons- but Cheers I had only watched in full once during the Pandemic with my family, wanting to finally get to grips with his entire history. When Frasier showed up, I actually began to take a few notes, getting a better picture of how the character came to be and noticing things that seemed to bleed into his spin off. That started to be what got me excited about making a video, wanting to bring all of those connections together. For years I’d been told the frasier of cheers was very different to the Frasier of, well, Frasier, but I felt I could see the same traits I loved about the character from the very beginning, as well as the influences in the creation of Cheers at large that would be refined on his own sitcom, and a possible video began to brew, later realised in the events detailed above. 

 However, when I finally sat down to make it happen, starting in earnest around the end of last year, I wanted to obviously go further, go through every episode and make note of whatever might be of use, as well as things that I found personally interesting or funny. This resulted in a ‘Cheers Cheat Sheet’ I created where I made short hand notes that actually helped me keep track of everything I needed later when editing, really rough notes that had certain actions, lines and funny observations hastily written down so I could hang onto the feeling of when I wrote them. If I wanted footage of a certain event, scene or even a simple action that would look good in the video, I just needed to consult the sheet and get that episodes clip edited into the timeline. This made the editing process way less frustrating than it had been when I did the Hill Street video, not having to hunt down stuff from episodes I only half remembered.

 Research was also started around the same time. Cheers was made before people made an industry out of behind the scenes content, so a lot of the material I had to gather from obscure news pieces, old editorials uploaded to YouTube, individual interviews with the writers and actors, tv biographies, all that good stuff. As mentioned Ken Levine, one of the writer-producers of the show, ran a blog where he uploaded answers to thousands of questions about the show, and then graduated to making a podcast which he still runs today, talking to many people from both shows history and talking about the art of comedy and storytelling in Hollywood. It helped fill in so many gaps and more notes were made to decide which would be most relevant, and where to put all that information. I was after all the information relevant to either Kelsey Grammer or Frasier as a character, and that included any of the characters I felt were directly adjacent to his development- Sam, Lilith, and of course, the person I discovered was his blueprint- Diane. 

I  have always been fascinated with Diane Chambers and knew the video would have to feature her heavily, but I don’t think I appreciated how integral she was to actually defining Frasier. It was also true that Shelley Long’s time on the show was the subject of huge debate, as discussed in the video, with people either saying she was wronged by a frat boy cast, or that she was difficult to work with. Well, frankly, I fell down a rabbit hole when committing to research, discovering reports about Shelley and her career that could make for an entire video. The fact of the matter is, though, that a lot of this was strictly about her personal life, and while much of it suggested what was really going on, in the end I decided it was better to stick to mostly talking about the character and making sure the sensationalised parts of the story were dealt with responsibly, while also stressing her importance to the show. Some of this I will talk about later down the line, some I won't- Either way, trust me when I say the Diane section, when writing the video, really came from the heart. I relate to Frasier, and boy, by proxy, do I relate to Diane.

The basic script came together relatively quickly and all the information and story was assembled in what I initially thought was a well structured version of everything I needed on the page- but, as passionate as I had been in putting that all together so far, I realised I was running into problems that made me severely doubt myself. There was a point where I had a redrafted, finished script, totally voiced and edited, inserted into a timeline with a bunch of clips already settled in- but I realised very quickly something wasn’t right.

ZZZZZZZZ

 You might remember I originally promised a month turnaround, then announced at the end of that month that I had a problem with the script and doubled back to fix it. Well that problem was that I didn’t really feel the video flowed very well. It was really, really dull.

 I had a couple issues here- Number one, I was going through season by season, telling the story as it happened and sprinkling in analysis where I thought possible, feeling it was the best way to show the characters development. I hadn’t made allowances for every single cut I would need to explain parts of the story, and in a lot of places I’d over-explained it instead of letting the footage do the talking, and let the actual analysis take a back seat. This only became apparent when I put the audio in the timeline and was confronted with the actual length of the clips and the amount of them, as well as how it all actually flowed in the edit.

 Number two, I was talking about Frasier’s own show at the same time as talking about Cheers. I suddenly realised that might be very confusing- to hop back and forth between the future and the past, almost like the Godfather Part 2, in a video that was supposed to be just about Frasier’s time on Cheers. In the very first section I was talking about the future appearance of his mother and his dad and brothers opinion on that. But I hadn’t really established he had a dad and a brother yet. Hell, I was still establishing that he’d even dated Diane. Was that going to seem too messy?

 And number Three, each season’s section felt aimless. I found myself going ‘and then this happened, and then this happened, and now here’s a tangent about something else unrelated’, and it seemed like the video was just listing things going on without any great idea tying the video or individual sections together in any interesting way. Some of the clips went on way too long, I had far too many cutaways, and worried the video was becoming a pure clips show rather than a proper analysis. The final section originally didn’t have a Lilith or girlfriend section- it was just me talking about the final season as a sequence of things that happened all the way until the finale. I was deep into editing, I was also deep into losing the apartment after a price-hike, meaning anything I added or did would sound significantly different in my old recording space at my family home. I felt awful about how the video had developed, and had no idea how I was going to solve this quickly.

 Around the same time, I’d also been re-watching my old Sly videos for the patreon commentaries and was marvelling at how I’d managed to tell the stories of those games while making every section interesting, creating one heck of a sense of flow. One of the ways I’d done that was by making sure every section of the video was about an aspect of the overarching theme. In one section I’d talk about gameplay, then about the characters, then about the dynamics, the environment, all while telling the story through those compacted ideas that started small and built on from each other. That’s what the Frasier video was missing- the big theme, the concept of what the whole thing was *really* about, and each section needed to reflect a different idea. It was late, but I was finally hit with a sense of how to make it work, something I’d clearly done before.

Revision

 So the first fix was to go through each section, look at the points being made, and ask myself if there was a common word or idea that brought them altogether, and then rewrite the paragraphs to tie them into that idea, allowing me to keep most of the hard work that was already done if possible. The first section was about setting up his character but also showing he had more to say, so that became about ‘potential.’ The Karaoke bar happened in a season where I found myself talking a lot about tricks Kelsey Grammer was pulling off as an actor, so that became about ‘performance’. The second with his first wife was also about other interesting sitcom plots he got involved in and culminated in the fantastic wedding farce, so that became about ‘situations.’ And, amazingly, that went a long long way to making the video more interesting, without necessarily changing what was already there too drastically.

(At one point I tried to take all these words that married everything together and liken them to freudian concepts, but it was a meta-step too far as I could never find categories of Freudian or even Jungian theories that fit all the ideas I knew I wanted in there. Perhaps with a few more months, eh?)

 Those definitions immediately improved each section and soon I was able to weave in more of the analysis and research to match, as well as improve the style of editing. The cheat sheet I made helped the initial draft of the video, but there was still a lot of time spent figuring out which clips would be best for vaguer points I was making, where I didn’t know exactly what I was going to show on screen. In those moments I tend to pick a variety of examples from various episodes to prove that these things happen more than once, have the visuals truly match up to what I’m trying to say rather than just slapping in something that looks like it might be true and calling it a day. I had a separate timeline open where any clips I couldn’t immediately find a place for but wanted in the video could go, as well as cutaway clips I might want to use, spending ages debating which bits worked best in spots I didn’t initially plan to cut away from.

 Obviously there was a lot I knew would be in since the start and had written the script around, and needed to figure out how to avoid a pure clip-show feel. There’s also, because it’s YouTube, the decision on how to edit those clips either down to not take too much time, cutting out certain lines or audience laughter, and also how to edit around them so as to not get picked up by YouTube copyright bots. A lot of them did, but one trick I stumbled on was intercutting other shots or clips from other episodes, which as it turned out suited the style and message of the video better. Rather than let a clip from Frasier play out uninterrupted, it was better to cut back to cheers to show what they were talking about, either literally or emotionally, to demonstrate the points being made without necessarily saying a lot and also to deepen the connection between the two shows.

 Essentially, I reasoned with myself that the video needed to become a mosaic of Frasier’s life on Cheers. I knew in the end that I could never fully avoid the feeling of a clip show and in some ways that was okay, figuring there would be fans of both who just wanted someone to collect all the information about Frasier and put it in one easily accessible place, very different to a lot of my other videos. That said I also wanted to use those clips to say things I otherwise couldn’t in the script. I think for a lot of fans there are things said on Cheers or Frasier that feel connected to this greater idea of the character but aren’t often brought together in the same place, and I really wanted to create that, something where the impact of characters like Lilith or Diane were constantly present in his life, where people who only knew them through Frasier could see the history that had always been there, right under their nose.

 It also helped to choose music that gave each section a unified sound where possible. I originally had absolutely no idea what I was going to pick to underscore, originally looking for songs that had been mentioned or featured on either show, a couple of which made it into the video- but then I realised I had a full library of ragtime and standards that fit the feel of an old pub and matched some of the picks i'd already made. Made things a lot more fun after that, sometimes using the music to comment on the situations, too. 

 Doing all of that was what helped me better realise that it needed one last section before the end. Having spoken about Frasier’s relationships with Diane, Lilith and Nanette, I realised the stage had been set for Frasier’s flaws as a character. I was also, while picking out music, looking at some Sondheim tracks, with Frasier and myself both being fans, and while listening to Company’s ‘Drive a person crazy’ got a mad image of Frasier’s three Cheers Girlfriends in the singing roles, feeling some of the lyrics near the end could easily apply to Frasier. I told my sister and she goes ‘well, you have to put that in the video now’. It was the piece I’d been missing, and I realised in the end it actually fed into the ultimate truth of Frasier, as someone who was extremely lonely. That was when everything I’d written clicked into place, and I made one last re-draft of the final speech in the video to express that. It finally felt complete.

 Ultimately this was as much about me and my life and failings as much as it was about Frasier. It’s no accident I begin it talking about how alike we are because it’s really an excuse to open up, without outright saying anything, about my own issues and relationships I’ve experienced in my life. Loneliness is obviously a huge angle, not in a simplistic way of having no friends but finding it difficult to relate to people outside of your experience or to best understand yourself, and yet not wanting to let go of what you think makes you, well, you. I felt people could just watch it as a straight retrospective, but if they paid attention to that intro, could read more of the video as saying something else, realising that this was about myself and my own relationships and friendships, and hopefully feel a more real, empathetic pull towards the subject than someone simply talking about the history of a great sitcom character.

  I think all of this worked for the best. This was a character I really wanted to do justice to, and I worried there was a better video than the one I had come up with still in my brain somewhere. In the end, I can’t think of another video that would have worked, and this one seems to be getting good reviews anyway- so maybe this was the best possible video to have made after all.

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And that’s all I got! I hope this was an insightful look into the mad attempts I took trying to get this huge video together. There will be a little more content related to this on the way, so look out for that too. Until next time!

- B