All Eyes on Me

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 )

I am probably going to go see IT. I'd like someone to go with me, but most of my friends don't want to see horror movies and I've never minded seeing movies alone. I wish I could take my mom, the biggest Stephen King and horror movie fan ever, and mostly I want to go in her honor. This new version is supposed to be pretty good, so I bet she would have enjoyed it.

One thing strikes me, though. I think the new clown design is effectively creepy and all, but he weirdly reminds me of the time Frasier dressed up as a clown to play a prank on his dad. I think it's the shape of the head; Kelsey Grammer has a fairly large forehead exacerbated by the receding hairline, so I can't help but see him in the particular way they're representing Pennywise in the new movie. It makes it a little funnier and a little less scary to me. Maybe that's a good thing, as I generally am a crybaby when it comes to horror films, so maybe I'll have an easier time with a little of the bite taken out of it.

I was drowning in work today-- but I did manage to write something, however tiny!

The original Frasier always had a little dialogue-free scene running over the credits, so my piece will follow the same form. I figure that by the end of the pilot episode, Freddy and David will have come to some accord and attempt to get along, so I figured the tag ought to reflect that. It's just a little thing, but I think it's cute and hopefully kind of funny.

TAG:

As the credits roll, Freddy and David amuse themselves from the couch by trying to toss hats onto Brody’s head. Finally, Freddy gets up and fetches the mortarboard from his Harvard graduation. Tossing it like a Frisbee, he expertly lands in between the bear’s ears. David cheers and holds up his arms in the “it’s good!” sign.

Ugh. So here's the problem with this scene. It's another for the Fraiser spinoff pilot, but it uses an idea I'm not sure I want to include.

I really want to have Freddy believe that David came to him in need, which create a sense of responsibility to his cousin that he latches onto for emotional validation. The idea that he has something to offer a desperate David makes him feel good. But then I want it to turn out that David's actually just using him for something else, which makes Freddy feel betrayed. It will temporarily cause him to withdraw his support out of hurt, but realizing that David's immaturity makes him need Freddy's guidance more than ever leads him back to actually be there for his cousin. That will create a real basis for their relationship-- David needs to learn from and rely on Freddy, and Freddy is taken outside his unhappy self-obsession by taking care of someone else. That idea is super solid and I want to use it.

Additionally, I want to include Alice Doyle in the cast. The trouble there is I'm not sure how. She'd need to turn up in Boston for some reason, and be hooked into the plot somehow, but I was concerned how to do that in a way that wasn't too coincidental with how David happened to arrive in Boston at the same time, after the two of them grew up in Seattle. She's also six years older, which puts her at a slightly different place in life than either Freddy or David.

So where I'm tripping is, what should David's true motivation be? And how does Alice factor in? Unfortunately, at the moment, the only thing I can think of to make these work are to have Alice arrive in Boston for grad school and David, who was believed he was in love with her since he was a kid, decided to come to Boston after his Yale suspension to try to keep pursuing her. She has rejected him in the past and continues to, intending to go on with her own life.

The advantage of this is that it folds her into the story in a sensible way, taking away some of the coincidence. It's a solid ulterior motive for David moving in with Freddy, and one likely to make Freddy feel used and offended. It also makes the need to honor her feelings and develop a relationship with her based in friendship and respect part of David's growing up process.

The problem, however, is that it's a little stale to motivate one of my two primary leads with a disappointed crush on a woman. Despite my intention for her to be one of the main cast and a fully-rounded character in her own right, it brings Alice into things initially as a plot device. I hate doing that to a female character.

I might be able to make it work in a way that wasn't reductive. Maybe if I show that the POINT is that she's her own person and that David is making a mistake in how his crush on her makes him ignore her own agency. It might be okay then. But I'm not sure.

I'd love to think of some other way to make these ideas work, but at the moment I don't have anything else. So I took a crack at it with this scene. It would fall directly after Day #20 - "Reaching Out" in the scene order.

If I did use this, though, it would mean that the whole first half of the pilot was drafted.

( Day #27 - Grow Up )

And the completion of the scene where David moves into Freddy's apartment in my Frasier spinoff pilot! This is the last piece, after part one in Day #19 - Lucky Bear and yesterday's part two, Day #22 - Men of the Ivies. The parts probably could probably be a little more unified, but I like the overall direction. It does a good job of setting up the problem between Freddy and David, I think.

( Day #23 - Hanging )

Another scene from my Frasier spinoff idea. Needs to be funnier, but I'm rushing to catch up and just posting whatever I can bang out.

This occurs after previous scenes Day #15 - "Subtle but Unmistakeable Disappointment", Day #14 - The Cousins Crane, and Day #19 - Lucky Bear.

( Day #20 - Reaching Out )

This is totally banged out. I was working on other things today so I didn't really spend a lot of time on it. It's not refined in any way or nearly funny enough. But this is another scene for that (pointless) theoretical Frasier spin-off I was musing on. It would probably come before Day #14 - The Cousins Crane, as it sets Freddy up to find something to take him out of himself, rather than stewing constantly on his dissatisfactions.



Funny, it's the second TV show pilot scribbling I've done that involved the main character talking to a therapist. It's also the device I use for the opening scene of Bridesmaids, as in the first half Day #9 - Nothing Common and the second half Day #13 - About Me. It's a pretty convenient way to have them talk about their life and situation.

( Day #15 - Subtle But Unmistakeable Disappointment )

Rewatching Frasier as my current background noise while I work. It’s my favorite sitcom of its era, such that I still enjoy it even twelve years after it ended. It’s famously one of most successful sitcom spinoffs, possibly the very most, of all time. Now and then as I watch it, ideas about the show occur to me, that fact in particular has made my thoughts drift to possible further stories from there. If you don’t mind a slight spoiler, all of the characters end up with children by the end of it— Frasier already had his son Frederick, Roz had daughter Alice in season 5, and the series finale featured the birth of Niles and Daphne’s son David. Could there possibly be a show in focusing on the next generation of the Cranes?

It would be tough, of course, and not just because spinoffs seem to have a stigma as being pointless coattail-hangers. The biggest problem is the age differences between the cast characters. Freddy was born in 1989, Alice in 1998, and David in 2004, making them in 2016 ages 27, 18, and 12. Those are large enough gaps to make it so they couldn’t really be peers growing up.

So, if I were going to do it, how might I pull it off? The main theme of Frasier’s presence in both Cheers and in his own show was the conflict arising between his intellectual, upper crust delicacy and snobbery and the more down-to-earth, average sensibilities of his family and friends— but finding ways to reach out and make connections despite it. The secondary major theme, I would say, is the irony of having the drive and even talent to help other while usually not having any ability to help oneself. It would be true to that spirit to find some way to continue these into a spinoff about the next generation.

So say we focused on Freddy as our new central or central-ish figure. We last saw him at age 13 or so, and though he was still a fairly young child, he had an established personality. He was in many ways like Frasier— very intelligent, academically gifted, but a bit awkward and alienated from more regular people, with a fragility due to a slightly neurotic upbringing. In that way, he could stand in as a new Frasier figure, special and advantaged in many ways, but struggling to find belonging and connection in a world he doesn’t fit into. (I have always said that was Frasier’s true driving issue— that he’s never felt like he belonged and will do just about anything to get a taste of that feeling.)

So that covers half of it, but where’s the other half—the conflict of a guy with those particular qualities and those particular emotional needs clashing with less rarified people in his life? There, it occurs to me, is where David Crane could come in.

Since he was just a baby when Frasier ended, his characterization is completely up in the air. It strikes me that he could have the opposite personality from Frederick’s. The idea came from an episode where Daphne is pregnant and Niles is worrying what if his son takes after her blue-collar side of the family and he has no ability to relate. So instead of a refined, patrician kind of person like his cousin, uncle, and father, older David could be a more typically masculine young man— tough, broey, interested in sports and cars, even rebellious, getting into trouble and not following the rules. Not only would this give him that opposition to Freddy, it would spiritually echo the central conflict from the parent show— instead of a regular-joe father struggling to get along with his snobbish sons, David is a regular-joe son who doesn’t get along with his snobbish father.

The question then would be how to get Freddy and David into a situation of appropriate proximity for this conflict to play out in a show. Freddy grew up in Boston while David is from Seattle, but their age difference presents the greatest challenge. Freddy is 15 years older than David— what scenario could put them in regular contact that also wouldn’t be a grown man fighting with a child that isn’t his? I think you’d have to cast David as something APPROACHING a peer of Freddy’s for this to work at all.

So I gave it some thought and came up with the following idea. I’d set the show in Boston in the year 2022, six years from now and nineteen years after we last saw Frasier. A 33-year-old Freddy still lives and works there. He’s in some sort of professional job that he’s kind of a workaholic at— it’s probably too cheesy to have him be a psychiatrist too, but not sure what instead, maybe adjunct professor —but he’s pretty lonely because he’s kind of awkward and doesn’t relate to other people that well. (He probably sees a psychiatrist for it!) His dating life is nonexistent. He’s in contact with his mother, who still lives in Boston but who he tries to avoid seeing, and his father, who he talks to most on the phone because he lives in San Francisco with his wife. (I decided Frasier and Charlotte work out.) He’s doing okay, but his status as a child genius led to high expectations he never could really meet, and the vague disappointment and pressure from his parents seriously stress him out.

The change comes when David shows up on his doorstep. He was never that close to his cousin David— he’s fifteen years older and lived all the way across the country —but he knows they don’t have much in common. David played varsity sports, is obsessed with working on his car, and was constantly in and out of trouble at school. Basically the polar opposite of Freddy. Last he’d heard was that Uncle Niles had pulled some strings to ensure that David got accepted to college at his alma mater, Yale. But it turns out that partway through his freshman year, David got expelled for an incident that involved a prank gone wrong. Now he’s in Boston at Freddy’s, the only person he knows on the east coast, not sure what to do with himself.

Now Freddy gets tasked by the family to keep an eye on David, help him find his way and keep him out of trouble. Maybe Freddy helps David get enrolled at another Boston-area college, one more suited to him than Yale. In the process of respectively looking out for and needing one another, they could have their high-low personality clashes, as well as find common ground and each help the other learn what they lack. The age difference could mirror the parent show’s father-son dynamic, but it’s not so extreme as to shut out also playing on a brothers dynamic.

Much as I like focusing on the brothers thing, which could nicely echo the best part of Frasier, I’d really love to get Alice Doyle in there, somehow. An early idea I had is that she and David ended up in Boston is that a lovesick David followed her there and she rejected him, leaving him directionless and in need of Freddy’s support. But not only might that be too much on the bad side of sitcommy, Alice is also six years older, so I don’t know If that would really make sense. But otherwise it’s a bit coincidental that they both ended up there after growing up in Seattle. There are a ton of colleges in the Boston area, so maybe I could use that to say she’s going to grad school there? I’m not sure. Also, Niles and Daphne could have had other kids in the intervening time— one episode implied to give a future glimpse of their next child, a daughter —who could maybe appear sometimes too.

It wouldn’t have any of the main Frasier cast as regulars, probably— at one point they were the best-paid actors on television, and even though they’re not the superstars they were then, they’re still probably too expensive for that. I mean, if one of them wanted to, I could probably work them in, but there would be plenty of opportunities for guest appearances. I'd love to have Lilith pop up semi-regularly as his horrifying mother. Hell, in Boston, you could even have folks from Cheers.

If I could get any of them for regular guest spots, it would be David Hyde Pierce. And not just because I adore him, though I really do. Him appearing would allow for the demonstration of the tension between him and David, a son he doesn’t really relate to and is somewhat disappointed in. It would be a fun way to harken to Martin’s relationship to Niles and Frasier without reproducing it exactly. Of course, if you have Niles, you’d need Jane Leeves to be Daphne too.

What would I call it? I guess, in keeping with precedent, the obvious title is “Freddy,” but it doesn’t have the same power as the Freddy character isn’t firmly established in viewer’s minds the way Frasier was coming off of Cheers. But what else would work? "The Cousins Crane"? "Crane Boys"? I'd want something that uses the connection to the original as marketing, but still is representative of the new piece.

The child actor who played Freddy, Trevor Einhorn, is still working as an adult. He never blew me out of the water with his acting or anything, so I don’t know if he could carry his own show, but I like the continuity of it. Though I did see him in a role on Mad Men, where he had the distinction of giving Don Draper the frankest, most on-point read he ever received— “You have no character! You’re just handsome!” —a line that one day I will include in an analytical essay on the Power of Pretty in storytelling.



For tomorrow’s entry of 31P31D, I’m going to post a scene I wrote for this. Looking at how long this got, I decided to post the musing and “pitch” information separately today. It’s not the best use of my time to work on something like this, but 31P31D require writing something. And this was on my mind right now. Though I know it’s basically a pointless exercise.

UNLESS NBC IS LISTENING. CALL ME AND WE’LL TALK.

As I have occasionally mentioned before on this blog, I don't think I'm the most talented when it comes to writing comedy. I like to think of myself as a fairly witty person, who can make you laugh with a clever remark in conversation now and again. But when it comes to coming up with real jokes or funny lines, that's more the province of other writers. In my writing program, I thought of genuinely funny stuff as much more the province of my friend and boss Bill Pendergast, or how Julie Weinberg had such a knack for dark comedy.

Still, I certainly enjoy it for its own sake, but even moreso, I like it as a way to add balance and lightness to a heavier narrative. I've always felt that even really serious drama needs something to keep it from going into the territory of "grimdark." So, even though it's not always easy for me, I am endeavoring to get better at it so that I can effectively include it in my own work.

My favorite comedy of all time is probably Frasier, which I thought managed to be extremely funny while still maintaining a level of intellectualism, narrative and character integrity, and did not resort to tired or offensive stereotyping in jokes. I'm very inspired by the style of comedy therein with its level of wit and cleverness. I've also been watching Cheers, which happens to be the series from which Frasier spun off, and is considered to be a required text for anyone who hopes to write comedy. Honestly I find Cheers to be a bit dated and not nearly as funny as Frasier, nor does it have anywhere near the dramatic integrity, but it has a heart and charm to it that inspired countless humor pieces that came after it. I'm hoping to learn from examples like these.

The funniest thing I ever wrote is probably The Late Mrs. Chadwick, my most performed ten-minute play. The main joke, the resolute refusal to compromise stiff-upper-lip British manners, is one that plays to my strengths. I was pleased to find at the recent staged reading of Vivat Regina that pretty much all the jokes played, and in fact were some of the audience's favorite parts of the piece.

Most recently I've been working on a silly little side project, a fan fiction for Cabin Pressure, a BBC radio comedy that I find extremely funny. I started it just to have a little low-pressure positive feedback on something, and I'm determined not to stress about it, but I have been making an effort to make it not only funny, but as much in the style of the source material as possible. It has a particular kind of dry British humor that is very distinctive. I do find myself struggling to come up with bits and gags. I'm positive it's not as funny as any of the originals, but I do think I've managed to capture the characters' unique voices. Some commenters have even said things to that effect; my favorite so far was the one who said if the creator John Finnemore retired, they'd tune in if I were the replacement! :-) That's encouraging. But I know I still need more practice. Like any aspect of writing, you got to put in the work!

Here is my next short play draft for my latest assignment for school. It was inspired by a very theatrically constructed episode of Frasier called "Dinner Party," which I always thought would make a good play. In my effort to keep it "inspired by" as opposed to "shamelessly ripping off of" that episode, I did not rewatch it while writing and tried to just capture the spirit of it. I'm not sure I succeeded. As it is, the piece is rough and needs polish. It's not very funny yet; I'll need to touch up all the jokes. But I think it has good bones and can be whipped into shape with some work. As it is, here is the early, awkward first draft. 

       ( The characters are clearly inspired by how a certain pair of brothers interact... )