31 Plays in 31 Days, #3 - "Just a Kid"

Today’s scene stems from The Cousins Crane, my idea for a spinoff of Frasier featuring the children of the main cast.

One of my artistic goals for that idea was to take the themes and concepts from the Frasier show and iterate on them. One of those was the Niles-Daphne relationship. While I liked them together, and thought that the whole business was funny, outside of sitcom-land it’s pretty uncool for a guy to follow a woman around and obsess over her for so long without asking if she was interested. So, in this show, I wanted to take that concept— a man pining over a woman who was apparently uninterested —and show a different version of it, that was a little more critical and maybe a touch more realistic.

So I used David, Niles and Daphne’s son, and Roz’s daughter Alice for that. I had David, who is also six years younger than Alice, obsess over her similarly to how his father obsessed over his mother. But Alice is definitely not interested, tells him so, and asks him to back off. And when he has trouble with that, she calls him on how inappropriate it is.

This scene includes Alice talking to Freddy, Frasier and Lilith’s son, about her feelings on the subject. It grew out of the circumstances of her birth in the original, which I thought could be interestingly related to her current situation with David.

You can listen to the entire Zoom reading of the Cousins Crane pilot here.



( Day #3 - Just a Kid )