NYT Article on Niles and Daphne from 2000

[Schmoopie]

Found this while reading the Wikipedia page for Niles Crane. Ouch! This woman does not like Niles and Daphne at all and it makes me wonder if she even liked the show at all. Keep in mind it was written during the show's run so the "mystery" of the fate of Niles and Daphne is kind of ruined but we all know what happens anyway, right? And I have to admit that I disagree with about 99% of this article. Just wanted to share it anyway.


TELEVISION/RADIO; Couples Who Aren't (or Who Shouldn't Be)
By WENDY LESSER
Published: November 26, 2000

I HATE to say it, but ''Frasier'' just isn't the same since Niles and Daphne got together.

Part of the reason I hate to say it is that it makes me seem such a killjoy, an enemy of true love and all that. I mean, everybody, including me, had been rooting for them to get together for years. They were, after all, the only potentially appealing relationship in a show that is all about ghastly marriages, unfriendly divorces, bad one-night stands and other examples of love gone awry. Niles and his brother, Frasier, both practicing psychiatrists, might be expected to have some practical insight into decent relationships, but in fact both are divorced from horrible women -- the frighteningly deadpan Lilith in Frasier's case, the invisible shrew Maris in Niles's. And Niles's recently acquired second wife, a rigidly nit-picky cosmetic surgeon, is hardly much of an improvement on the first.

Despite or perhaps because of this generally pessimistic perspective, we viewers have had a great deal invested in the frequently frustrated, tantalizingly attenuated, totally impractical passion that Niles cherished for Daphne, his father's physiotherapist. This is partly because David Hyde Pierce, who plays Niles, is a comic-pathetic actor of genius, a sort of modern-day Buster Keaton for TV. His doggish look of longing, his clumsily unself-knowing version of lust, and his Woody Allenish (that is, early Woody Allenish) fear of rejection have been the stuff of many sight gags. More poignantly, the few moments over the years when Niles has almost told Daphne how he feels about her have raised the show out of the realm of good-but-standard sitcom and into the region of classic romantic comedy -- you know, those moments when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, or Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck seemed to be communicating with each other on a level even they couldn't understand.

''Frasier'' does, in fact, capitalize on something that those 1930's and 40's movies reveled in: the special connection between a rather hesitant, girlishly soft, unbelievably innocent man and a more down-to-earth, sharp-tongued, worldly-wise woman. Niles and Daphne fit this profile perfectly (Jane Leeves, who plays Daphne, has a singularly appealing tartness), and so do Frasier and his radio producer, Roz, though in a very different way. The show has featured a certain amount of suppressed sexual byplay between the latter pair as well, but the Niles-Daphne relationship has repeatedly come closer to the edge. And now, with last season's runaway bride finale (Daphne, on the verge of marrying the solid, loving but dull Donny, fled the church in a Winnebago driven by Niles, who can barely drive) and this season's episodes establishing them as an acknowledged couple, the show has gone over that edge and, in the process, eliminated it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that happiness just isn't as amusing to watch as frustration, misunderstanding and self-pity. (I am surely not the only person to feel this way; the ''Frasier'' writers appear to be dying of boredom with their new subject matter.) It's also the case that Niles simply isn't cut out for the role of triumphant lover, which requires a degree of assertive masculinity and chest-beating protectiveness he can't plausibly summon up. Watching him try to come up with affectionate nicknames for Daphne is a stomach-turning experience. Perhaps it's meant to be stomach-turning (those wise-guy writers again, having their revenge on the resistant material), but if so, how long can we be expected to tolerate the relationship? And if it ends, what can possibly follow? Imagining Niles and Daphne going sheepishly back to their previous positions, sans sexual tension, is a bit like imagining Anna Karenina going back to her husband and having Vronsky over for the occasional formal tea party. I just can't see it.

But the problem with the current Niles-Daphne relationship is more generic than that; it goes back to the very roots of serial television. (''Way, way back,'' as Henry Fonda said to Barbara Stanwyck in ''The Lady Eve,'' with that daft faraway look in his eyes.) What television thrives on, and what almost no other medium can use to quite the same degree, is the stretched-out unconsummated relationship. I'm not just talking about sexual relationships here. Look at ''The Fugitive'' (old version or new, take your pick): we all know that when the wrongly convicted doctor finally catches up with the one-armed man, the show has to end, so we put up with the weekly slipping-from-his-grasp in a way that almost no other art form, aside from comic strips, would ever ask of us. The same is true of ''The Pretender,'' with Jarod's constant near-miss escapes from his pursuers at the Center. And I'm sure there are a half-dozen shows from the last few seasons built along similar lines. But for the purpose of this discussion, let's limit ourselves to the everlastingly unconsummated sexual relationships between male and female characters.



http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/ar...e&pagewanted=1