Deep life lessons surface while watching ‘Frasier’ | Whale’s Tales

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 1, 2026

I loved the old TV sitcom “Frasier.”

The writing was brilliant, the actors were funny, and everyone associated with the show was clearly at the top of their game.

I laughed when Frasier’s dates ended in shambles, as they often did. Or when he made an ass of himself with his pomposity. Or when he advised his brother, Niles, to stop pursuing Daphne (Frasier and his father’s maid), and she started dating a man who looked, acted and spoke exactly like Niles.

As he said when Niles and his aforementioned doppelgänger met for the first time: “No rough stuff,” Frasier said, looking at the two identicals. “That’d be too weird!”

Perhaps my favorite episode, however, was when Frasier’s obsession to find out from a former girlfriend why she had suddenly dumped him, devolved into repeated acts of witless and humiliating desperation.

“How quickly a whiff turns into a stench (of desperation),” Niles commented, as he listened to a recording of Frasier’s 50-or-so recorded pleadings to his lost love.

But a funny thing happened later when I watched the reruns. Turns out that, unaware, I had had a change of heart and mind about certain scenes. Watching the episodes again, Frasier’s talent for self-sabotaging had suddenly become so excruciatingly painful for me to watch that I had to turn away, turn the channel.

A psychiatrist would probably tell me that I had identified with the character on Frasier because of my own impressive history of dumb acts. Maybe. Could be.

But now I ask you: when the sorry state of the world gets to be too much, wouldn’t it be just boffo if we could turn away, find another channel?

Unhappily, none of us can make the actual bloody wars, power-mad psychopaths, bungled management, shocking incompetence in high places, shoot-‘em-ups at elementary schools, synagogues and churches, purported “holy men” who are actually money-grubbing scammers … go away by looking elsewhere.

See, I would like to believe in the inherent goodness of human beings. But given all I’ve seen lately, that’s become the flintiest of flinty propositions.

“What a piece of work is a man!” said the character Hamlet in Shakespeare’s’ famous play of the same name. The words reflect the playwright’s view of human nature, suggesting that while men appear noble and admirable, they are ultimately imperfect.

As with Hamlet, it’s bringing me down.

“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory,” said Hamlet. “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

Yes, what is this quintessence of dust?

I guess that as a kid, I thought the adults who ran things would be much, much smarter. That we’re not is more than a bummer.

And it all keeps happening on the only planet we have, and the existential threat that poses to our continuance compels me to pay attention, though lately I am sure the same look of shell shock I once saw in a famous painting of a U.S. soldier returning from battle looks out of my eyes.

For what it’s worth, I do occasionally exercise the Frasier open when the usual yaffle of talking heads gets to be too much.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.