Seattle's A Bit Player -- For All Its Friendly Frostiness, ''Frasier's'' Seattle Connection Is Transparent

THERE ARE TWO Seattles on prime-time television.

One is rendered by "Millennium," the Friday-night creep show on Fox (KCPQ-TV). It's about a criminal profiler, a member of a secret task force investigating bizarre slayings that portend nothing less than the end of the world. It's as if the Green River Killer and Ted Bundy had collaborated on a TV series, determined to revive the 1970s and '80s aura of the Puget Sound region as serial-murder capital of the world. The rain, the darkness, the damp streets and gritty bridges - the show's reliance on Seattle as the chosen precipice of the apocalypse is total. The result is a depressing hour of television. But it's not real. "Millennium" is filmed in Vancouver, B.C., safely 125 miles away.

If many people were watching it, "Millennium" would be a nightmare for Chamber of Commerce types: "Oh, no, you don't understand - all those people buried alive with their eyes sewn shut, that was up in Canada . . ."

The other Seattle of TV Land is a damned site more cheerful. "Frasier," the hit sitcom on NBC (KING-TV), is ensconced in a stunning, immaculate Queen Anne apartment overlooking the Space Needle and downtown. It rains all the time in the world of "Frasier," too. But unlike on "Millennium," these folks never get wet, and any dreariness is offset by coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

Add to the rain and coffee stereotypes occasional references to Microsoft, the pro-sports franchises and other Seattle peculiarities, and you have about the extent of the city's role in one of the most-popular sitcoms on television. Earlier this season, an episode involved a fictional player for the Sonics, but it was uncharacteristically provincial.

The people behind "Frasier" live within the influence of the Lakers, not the Sonics. Kelsey Grammer, who plays Dr. Frasier Crane, last visited Seattle seven or eight years ago, to shoot a commercial. Other cast members have spent time in Seattle more recently, and casting director Jeff Greenberg has a brother who lives here. But for the most part they see the city as tourists.

"Frasier" uses no exterior views to establish changes of locale. Grub Street Productions, which produces the show with Paramount Television, has never shot on location in the Northwest.

It's all done in Hollywood, on the Paramount Pictures lot in a surprisingly small space inside a dark soundstage - the same building in which "The Lucy Show" was filmed in the 1960s and "Cheers" held forth for 11 years, until it spun off "Frasier" in 1993. Outside, next door, there is a building that served as the front of the high school in the 1974-'84 series "Happy Days." Not far away is the stage where the original "King Kong" movie was filmed, back in 1933, when the property belonged to RKO Radio Pictures. With all that history and geographical trickery within the space of a few blocks, Seattle can be anywhere Hollywood wants it to be.

Still, a lot more could be done without even shooting in Seattle. The characters of "Frasier" seldom go outdoors except to get coffee or cocktails or to go to work. For folks who live among a population obsessed with outdoor activity, that's far odder than an incident of spontaneous combustion on "Millennium."

"It's kind of like the `Friends' show," says Janice Wilson, communications manager for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. "It supposedly takes place in New York, but you'd never know it. `Frasier' is really very similar. It's either in the radio station, or the coffee shop - which is certainly very Seattle - or in the apartment."

But never in the streets, or by the water. Mountains? What mountains? Instead of dispensing advice over fictional KACL radio in Seattle, where the terrain ranges from sea level to 14,411 feet, psychiatrist Crane might as well be working for "WKRP in Cincinnati," the 1978-82 sitcom whose Midwestern locale was incidental, as well.

The fact is, Seattle, a city whose residents have a strong sense of place, is a bit player on "Frasier." Some weeks, were it not for the enormous photographic transparency of downtown hanging outside the apartment window on the "Frasier" set, you would never know "Frasier" was set in Seattle. "It's rare for a TV show to be location-dependent," notes Joe Keenan, a supervising producer. The writers have painted a wonderful world of characters that could hang just about anywhere, thanks. Like "Millennium," "Frasier," too, would be a disappointment to the Chamber of Commerce.

Except that if you had to choose a 1997 prime-time program to portray Seattle, none would be better.

SEATTLE'S FRIENDLY frostiness is alive in the characters of Frasier and his brother, fellow psychiatrist Niles Crane, played by David Hyde Pierce. They are very uptight, obsessed with being urbane and in impressing those who are effete. Ever since its establishment by Midwesterners in 1851, Seattle itself has had a complex about stature. At the start, its founders aspired to make it nothing less than another New York.

Today, the three-county population of 2.8 million is a fraction of New York's, but Seattle is a metropolis whose residents are regarded as proportionately more literate than those of other cities. Frasier and Niles would fit right in.

As sitcoms go, "Frasier" is fine literature. The writers aim high in humor, letting the characters, even the plain-speaking ones, supplant put-downs with wisdom - albeit very funny wisdom. When Daphne, the housekeeper played by Jane Leeves, is dumped by her boyfriend, Niles immediately wants to proclaim his long-suppressed love for her. Frasier advises him to wait a day. But by then it seems too late. After Daphne gets off the phone with a man who has asked her out, she cheerfully notes the serendipity. Niles shoots Frasier a look: "Timing is everything." So is simplicity.

As a media figure, Frasier has done plenty of embarrassing things in public, including making love in his studio with the microphone turned on. But his Seattle radio career has never suffered. The show is true to the town's tolerance. "We've portrayed the city as uniquely forgiving," says Keenan.

"Frasier" is regarded by critics as one of the best-written situation comedies on television. Seattle is the darling of national media, turning up on magazine covers numerous times a year. The show and the city deserve each other.

If nothing else, the Chamber of Commerce ought to be pleased there are all those eyeballs tuning in every Tuesday. At the end of its fourth season, "Frasier" is ranked 13th out of more than 100 shows on the six commercial networks, drawing an average estimated audience of 11.7 million households every week.

NBC has renewed "Frasier" for three more seasons, assuming the ratings don't plummet. The cast is contractually locked in, as well. Grammer says he'd like to carry on through a decade. The program goes into syndication in the fall, which means previous episodes will air five days a week on channels all over the world, in addition to its NBC prime-time run - probably for decades.

That's a lot of exposure for Seattle. So what if the city doesn't permeate the "Frasier" plot lines?

LAST WEEK'S episode is a case study of the incidental setting, the show's brilliant writing and the art form of the sitcom. Seattle was not mentioned in the least. But a play-within-a-play plot and lean, rapid-fire dialogue were deemed by the writers and producers as among their best work this season.

Produced in January, "Frasier" episode No. 89 was written by sitcom veteran David Lloyd. But an army of other writers and producers refined it through routine daily rewrites, and the journey from mind's eye on paper to a living, breathing, laughing performance proved to be more ballet than play, with former Shakespearean actors, a skilled director, an army of idea people, grizzled camera operators with tape measures, a set designer and carpenters contributing to the finished work.

"We've been wanting to do this story since the first season - Frasier putting on a radio play - and we've finally figured out a way to do it," said executive producer Christopher Lloyd, who is the son of this particular script's lead writer (but who is not the actor known for "Taxi").

In last Tuesday's episode, titled "Ham Radio," Frasier uncovers an old radio-drama script and convinces the management of KACL to let him produce it to mark the station's 50th anniversary. He recruits KACL staffers and others - including Niles - to read the various parts of the murder-mystery, but the live program turns out to be a disastrous collision of egos and insecurities. Quintessential Frasier, quintessential "Frasier."

In real life, Wednesday at the Paramount lot is radio-play day - "table read" day, actually, when the actors sit in a conference room behind the soundstage bleachers and read a new script. In addition to the actors, there must have been 50 production people and crew crammed in to hear "Ham Radio," and as the cast read the lines, the captive audience was in hysterics. Many in the room clearly excelled at envisioning things as they can be, because at this early stage it seemed amusing but not hilarious to some outsiders.

By the end of the reading, it was determined that the script was 27 minutes and 30 seconds. This left little room for the network to make money with commercials. The script had to be cut to the usual 21 minutes and 10 seconds. The first order of business for the writers was set: They would deliver a shorter second draft of the script the next day and punch up some of the jokes.

For every 10 Seattleites who would like to tell a Hollywood writer that it doesn't rain constantly in the Northwest, there's a Hollywood writer who would like to tell those from the real world that the sun doesn't always shine in Los Angeles. Such was the case that day last January, the first of the five-day production cycle for "Ham Radio." The script did not once mention Seattle, but outside it was drizzling.

TV-SITCOM SCRIPTS are in flux right up until a few hours before a show is filmed or videotaped. The refinement at "Frasier" sometimes is the difference between good and great. The show has won numerous Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards. "It could be anything from a 10 percent adjustment of the script - change a few jokes here and there and shortening things - to a 75 or 80 percent change in the script, if something just didn't work at all," said Lloyd.

"Ham Radio" was a 10 percent script. The atmosphere was relaxed as a dozen writers and producers, with help from series co-creator and that week's director David Lee, nitpicked lines. An eight-page cut proved easy, leaving plenty of time to wrestle with future scripts in various stages of development. Some might be mere ideas, such as "great American coffee-out," to name a fragment on the list for next season. Others might be in outline or first-draft form.

Attention to detail is one thing, but success has come as much from the intangible.

"Somewhere along the line the choice was to give Frasier a brother instead of a sister, to have the father have a dog," Lloyd said. "Everybody loves that dog!

"To remove any of those - at what point is it not a hit anymore?"

And there was the time slot. Before it became a Tuesday-night anchor of its own merit, "Frasier" was launched by NBC on Thursday in what has become known as the time period reserved for anointed new shows. "We were on after `Seinfeld,' " Lloyd noted.

AT SOME POINT, THE producers hope to shoot portions of several episodes in Seattle, perhaps for the 1997-'98 season. It was considered this season. But finding plots that justify the expense and hassle - a sitcom is inherently a stagelike art form - is difficult.

If it is not overt from week to week, from the beginning Seattle played a tangible role in the making of "Frasier." When the creators decided to spin off the Dr. Frasier Crane character from "Cheers," they determined to move him as far away from Boston as possible to maintain creative freedom, to resist the network's natural tendency to want to have the characters from that previous, wildly successful show drop by constantly - a proven ratings ploy.

"Frasier" was created by David Angell, Peter Casey and Lee. They were the supervising producers of "Cheers" who went on to form Grub Street Productions and create another sitcom, "Wings."

At first, Denver was on their minds. But "Frasier" was being developed about the time Colorado was in the throes of homophobic politics, and that didn't sit well with the producers.

"And then we started talking about Seattle," recalled Casey. "I guess it was about the time the grunge movement was starting to come into the spotlight and the whole coffee revolution was getting publicized, coming out of Seattle, and so that began to really appeal to us."

It also struck them that Seattle was a sophisticated city where the snooty Dr. Frasier Crane would fit in well. "Something about it seemed to reflect Frasier," said Lloyd. "Frasier wouldn't move to a flashy place like L.A. There's something certainly windy about Frasier, something cloudy about him.

"These aren't characters who go out windsurfing and jogging and playing softball," Lloyd said. "They're people who like to sit inside and talk about the subjects of the day."

One subject of today is the relationship between baby boomers and their parents, and it seems to resonate.

"Originally, it was just going to be a workplace comedy," Casey said, but as the focus shifted to the uncomfortable relationship between Frasier and his father and his brother, the producers realized they had "something that hit home with a lot of people our age."

And if such reality is the basis, the term "situation comedy" becomes somewhat of a misnomer.

"We can do full-blown farce on this show and still have it rooted in reality, and that gives it credibility," Grammer said after a rehearsal.

FRIENDSHIP AMONG CAST members seems rooted in reality. They claim they all genuinely like each other. Perhaps jolly John Mahoney, who plays Martin Crane, the father of Frasier and Niles, proves the camaraderie is credible. He has a license to dish anything to anybody: "I've never been around people who were so self-centered," he deadpans in front of his fellow co-stars. "And Kelsey's just a big fat pain in the . . ."

By some accounts, Grammer was a pain during his substance-abuse relapse last fall, when he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic to dry out. The show lost a few weeks of production.

"Kelsey was having some big problems and some big problems were solved with him going in there," Casey said. "And he's been great since coming back."

"Frasier" is an ensemble comedy, but Grammer's presence is overwhelming. He is a big man, and during the week of "Ham Radio," he strutted his hours upon the stage. He hammed, he sang show tunes and pop hits, he mimicked stage directions, he played the grand piano in the apartment between scene rehearsals. He was constantly in motion, downing popcorn, peanuts, even at nine in the morning. He sucked bottled water, not coffee. In the first scene, set in Cafe Nervosa, Grammer was supposed to order from the coffee bar. "What is a tall-skinny, by the way?" he asked.

The whole cast was loose, blowing lines right and left, reading directly from the script much of the time, at least until Tuesday, production day. There is a final dress rehearsal that day and, in the evening, the filming before the live audience of about 220 people.

THE AUDIENCE FOR "Ham Radio" seemed to be in large part family and friends of the cast and crew. The remainder filling the bleachers were off the street. A lot more didn't make it in.

Between scenes, a jazz band played and a stand-up comedian, who works the "Frasier" crowd every Tuesday night, told jokes, interviewed audience members and answered questions.

The first question: "Is the dog on the show tonight?"

"You know," David Willis replied, "that's funny, because we have all these Emmy Award-winning actors, and what we get is: `Puppy!' Yes, the dog will be on the show."

The second question: "Do we get to pet him afterward?"

Moose, the Jack Russell Terrier who plays Eddie, is a huge star.

The filming of the 21-minute episode took more than three hours. Each scene was shot at least twice. Grammer, who seemed to have the least grasp on his lines just hours before, hardly missed a beat. The audience thought it was hilarious.

"Ham Radio" was a hit, without any help from Seattle.

Chuck Taylor writes about television and radio for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer.