chambers.

here's my analysis of s4 in the guise of sam blow drying diane's hair. :-)

this certainly awakened something in me. i've never seen a fic to fruition before this, and now that i have some time freed up between now and the fall i'd like to work on some more of these! then it's back to Total Consumption by Academic Writing

i did not foresee this initially but am somewhat thrilled to say i am sad that the frasier reboot has come to an end. although it certainly revived old frustrations that felt dated, every episode was an improvement from the last and it ended up being a barrel of laughs. it was cardboardy and infuriating at times; but it was gentle and thoughtful at others.

i especially love freddy and a point of interest, for me, is that he's characteristically closer to a cheers character than a frasier character. this character who is downplaying his bookish intellect because 1. it doesn't cohere to what he feels is expected of the blue-collar life he's more comfortable in and has made for himself after recognizing he was happier dropping out of harvard (so he's doing a lot of, you guessed it, cheers-esque posturing; socially struggling to actualize various dimensions of himself between milieus) and 2. i'd imagine his self-suppression is largely in response to not wanting to emulate his father's pomposity. but i love the moments where we see that, sometimes, freddy just cannot hold back and can be that way. that's in line with cheers' ethos. it would have been nice if we'd have seen freddy's jewish identity pulled through more too, though.

but i love to interpret that (roland barthes, anybody?) as one effect that diane left -- especially because equally fun is diane in s4 and onward for how she herself began using colloquiums she'd picked up in the bar. that makes the interpretation more tenable because the writers, at some point, were consciously having characters' dialogues affect other characters' dialogue (also sam @ carla in the diane years: "you're afraid of being vulnerable. oh, just a word i picked up somewhere.")

it's neat, and because it's a different cheers than the cheers before, it was refreshed and thus went on for as long as it did. (there's no way they could have taken the sam/diane arc farther in a way that consisted with the genre without it becoming exhausting, if we're being honest with ourselves) the writers take the show's characters in s6, and, while retaining their fundamental qualities, find new ways to reshape those qualities because of the change in the people around them. which. isn't that just like life!

this is the generalized analysis of that in workplace culture because in a specific application to cheers you need to look at cheers as a bar. what's more is that it's a red sox bar. so the setting's nonetheless ripe for the authentic bonding, at times escapist, and touching kinship network that we do see cultivated there. at the same time, however, for the employees these are characters put together from various socioeconomic backgrounds in a workplace setting who deal with the ensuing frictions of that. cheers is good because they tend to go about these things tacitly and not preach at you over it. but it's palpable and you feel it.

i honestly want to cite foucault's ideas about heterotopia here and to other aspects of what the setting's accomplishing through social critique, since heterotopias:

"are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside (...) Heterotopia has a function in relation to all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia of compensation is to create a real space—a space that is other."

while it's misguided to assign undue expectations to a sitcom-of-yore reboot (with the genre itself tending to subsist on easy references to original material for nostalgic kicks -- which frasier 2023 seems to think it does cleverly), it still feels like it was written in the 90's. even for what it is, critically, i don't think it should have to feel that dated, but it does. in the year 2023, i wasn't expecting them to revive the specific gag of fooling someone (in this case - the viewer!) into thinking a character is gay only for the purposes of a, "he's very straight!" punchline. that's, well. it's old-school frasier. you got me there.

i didn't hate the narrative of, "freddy is helping raise his friend's kid" because freddy's dad abandoned him when he was a kid! that's heartfelt enough, and tracks, until you remember the reboot's shebang is a carbon-copy of the original: freddy and frasier, from two different worlds, will learn how to strengthen their bond. nonetheless, the frasier writers don't seem to want to see to cohesion any substantial arc with that: freddy seems to have mostly independently entered into his love of the sox and fenway? (to the point where he owns a glass jar of fenway dirt. me too.) yes, he lives in boston, but sam malone was canonically a father figure to him. freddy learned how to talk in cheers, a red sox bar. i'm personally tired of prevalent "father and sons" media, but, could we not at least tie up some loose ends with freddy's motivations? probably not, if it detracts from us wanting to prioritize our love for frasier, and challenges too much ideas about biological family.

also, if you're going to write academic satire, while it did get a good laugh out of me (i am not made of steel), you're obligated to go structurally deeper than singing, "you can't fire me, i have tenure!" (but, LOL, all the same.) these were just two episodes. but if they're to set any kind of stage ...