‘Frasier’s’ John Mahoney Gave Sensitive Sons The TV Dad They Needed

Through the comfort of repetition, sitcom characters easily slide into feeling like family. Through a half hour a week or a lazy weekend afternoon binge, these hapless straight men and overeager newcomers and lovable doofuses become familiar, and that familiarity grows into genuine affection. This is why sitcoms old and new become the source of memes, as people express their kookiest but truest thoughts with Friends quotes or Good Place GIFs. Where dramas put us on emotional alert, the laughter a good comedy provides put us at ease.

For eleven seasons, Frasier was that show. It won five consecutive Emmy awards for Outstanding Comedy Series and was one of the brightest stars in NBC’s ’90s Must See TV galaxy. The show took Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) out of Boston and the comforting found family of Cheers and dropped him back home, in Seattle, with his blood relatives. At a time when NBC was heavy on friend-coms (Seinfeld, Friends, and their dozens of imitators), Frasier gave us a literal family sitcom–but one unlike any we’d seen before. David Hyde Pierce, almost the spitting image of Grammer himself back when he started on Cheers, disappeared into the role of Frasier’s anxiously fastidious brother Niles. And John Mahoney, a Tony-winning character actor known for roles in films like Say Anything… and Barton Fink, was cast as Frasier and Niles’ father Martin Crane. Mahoney, who just passed away at the age of 77, gave us a new kind of TV dad.

Frasier works because Mahoney works. While Niles and Frasier serve two-peas-in-a-pod comedy, Martin Crane–a cantankerous and retired police detective with a bad hip and a delightfully dopey dog–is exactly the foil that the fussy and pompous Frasier needed. It’s the kind of foil he never got in his near decade-long run on Cheers, as no one in that bar was his dad. It’s this push and pull, the battle of wills between a full-grown son and his polar opposite dad, that pushed the show from brilliant farce to legit, gut-punching art.

Martin and Frasier’s dynamic is real, painfully so. They’re a father and son with nothing in common save history, blood and a stubborn streak. Despite there being so many stories about fathers and sons, it’s the kind of relationship that you don’t see on television–specifically sitcoms–all that often. Adults on sitcoms rarely have parents to answer to–and if those parents come around, they leave after the credits roll. But Frasier is not a show about Frasier; it’s a show about Martin and Frasier, and the show conjured up something powerful every time it put that relationship front and center (“Travels with Martin,” “Chess Pains,” “Our Father Whose Art Ain’t Heaven”).

But what really happened, something that no writer or director or actor could have predicted, is that Frasier–specifically John Mahoney as Marty Crane–gave so many men exactly what they needed, something they didn’t know how to ask for from men who maybe didn’t know how to respond. Because Frasier isn’t just a show about a father and son; it’s a show about effete sons and a traditionally masculine dad. It’s champagne vs. beer, opera vs. baseball, “let’s talk about it” vs. “shut up.” The show mined that dichotomy for 11 seasons, but it found more than just comedic conflict. Frasier unearthed something more valuable that a punchline: it gave sensitive sons of all ages the dad they needed.

Martin Crane loves his sons. That is never in question. He’s also embarrassed by their social climbing and adherence to byzantine etiquette, sure. But his love for them is as strong as he is stern and, as seen in the masterful late-series installment “Room Full of Heroes,” he won’t let anyone–not even his own sons–question it. When a tipsy Niles suggests that he and Frasier were disappointments to their father, while dressed as Marty for a Halloween party, the elder Crane is disgusted.

“You stop right there,” he commands, rising to his feet. “You will not put these words in my mouth. I was always proud of you boys. And I will not be portrayed as some drunken, judgmental jackass.”

In that moment, in every moment across 264 episodes, Mahoney is operating on two levels. He’s tough and commanding, and you can see very bit of the cop he once was. But underneath that, Marty Crane is devastated–and you can tell. The heaviness of his words, the way his head tilts, the intensity of his eyes. That moment, and similar moments like it sprinkled throughout Frasier’s run, it’s the kind of honesty that these sons-who-aren’t-like-the-other-boys want from their fathers. Because those feelings, to the old way of thinking, they are the things that are better left unsaid. But Marty says them, and he says them the way he–a sarcastic man’s man–would say them. Every time Martin Crane opened up and let it all out, he showed that that there was another way to be a man, to be a dad.

And that’s the cathartic, therapeutic power of sitcoms in action. By playing a gruff ol’ man whose love for his sons is clear and, at times, blunt, Mahoney has given so many sensitive kids a role model, a surrogate, or a stand-in for the dads that couldn’t find the words, were taken too soon, or never showed up. That’s the power of his performance, and why Marty Crane was–and is–one of the best TV dads of all time.

John Mahoney never had children, but he has countless sons.

Where to stream Frasier