This is David Lee. I directed this episode,
which is called ''The Matchmaker''.
And I'm Joe Keenan. I wrote this episode.
This beginning, with a fire aIarm going off,
was a story fragment that kicked around for a long time.
We couldn't find a story to go with it,
so we plugged it into the beginning of this episode
as a fun, lively way to begin.
Originally, it was a story about what everybody grabbed first
when they thought there was a fire.
Frasier was upset because Martin went for Eddie before him.
But we couldn't quite build that into a real story.
I believe that Moose did it correctly the first time.
That was a one-take dog there.
Joe, as I recall, when you first pitched the story ''The Matchmaker'',
it didn't go over well with us.
It came out of a story we thought might be interesting,
if Daphne were to date Frasier's boss and what conflicts that brings.
We were vexed as to what would make Daphne having a date with him funny.
I said maybe it's funny if the boss thinks he's dating Frasier.
I outlined how that misunderstanding might come to pass.
For some reason, probabIy I didn't pitch it well, the idea didn't go over.
I still thought it would be a funny episode.
I worked on it a bit more before I pitched it again.
If I pitched it a second time and it didn't fly, the idea would be dead.
You were in the room and you cottoned to it.
You started developing it and it seemed we had an episode on our hands.
I remember sitting and laughing when we were working out the story.
That's always a good sign.
The other thing about this in the history of the series,
this is one of the first episodes you wrote.
I wrote an episode at the end of the first season when I was not on staff.
We did, after this, ''The Botched Language Of The Cranes'',
but this was the first episode I wrote on staff.
It was where we discovered something that you knew about yourself,
but much to our delight, the staff and soon America found out
that Joe was just an expert at writing
this sort of farce in the style of PG Wodehouse
and mistaken identities and merry mix-ups.
And we subsequently did several more of them in this style.
Joe and I sort of became the farceurs of ''Frasier''. ''The Ski Lodge''.
''The Ski Lodge''. ''The Two Mrs Cranes''.
It became a template for a lot of episodes we would do -
a lot of setup in the first act,
and the second act with almost continuous action.
In that scene we just saw, that was one of the first times
you saw a long scene between Frasier and Daphne.
They weren't pals in the first season.
In this story was Frasier's impulse to do something nice for Daphne,
which is not an impulse he'd exhibited before.
I remember when Roz slept around.
She doesn't do that so much...
It's less funny when you have a daughter.
I do miss it, though, because that persnickety relationship
between Roz and Niles was such a source of fun for such a long time.
They get along a lot better now,
so some avenues for comedy have been closed to us.
I think that's something that happens as shows age.
The characters get to know each other so well
and have been together for so long
that it's hard to sustain that type of friction without it seeming forced.
But unfortunateIy, like you said,
it does lose a little bit of comedy piquancy. Is that a word?
- It is now. - Thank you.
- One of my favourite Joe Keenan lines. - It is not actually a Joe Keenan line.
How gracious of you.
I was not present. I think Peter Casey did it.
The joke that I had, Niles made a crack about her little black book
and she said it wasn't black and he replied, ''Nor little.''
But that funnier joke was inserted.
I found the same joke in a script from the first season.
- It was from a Bebe Glazer episode. - Really?
You're a little detective, aren't you?
That scene we saw was to establish
that Roz is angry at Frasier for some reason,
which justifies a big plot twist that happens at the ad break.
That's what we call a Lenny and Squiggy entrance.
Good looking, smart, successful... Hello there!
This actor is named Eric Lutes. He'd just moved to LA from New York,
where he'd been a model and an actor.
And I believe this was, if not his first, one of his first jobs in LA.
It won him a role as a regular on ''CaroIine in the City''.
Jeff Greenberg, our casting director, makes it a habit to cast fresh people.
So many times on sitcoms, you see the same faces over and over again.
Jeff goes back to New York once a year for a couple of weeks
and scours the theatres and whatever dark places actors hang out in
and finds as many fresh faces as he can
and Eric is one of those fresh ones he came up with.
I do remember, after the episode aired,
Jeff Greenberg said his phone was off the hook,
wondering who that guy was because it's notoriously difficult
to find good-looking guys in that age range who can do sitcom.
It is why he was hired immediately to do ''CaroIine in the City''.
But Mr Lutes will not be aware of, until he listens to this commentary,
how hotly debated his casting was after the first run-through.
He gave a terrific performance, but at the first run-through, things were flat.
We came back wondering if we should perhaps recast the part.
I remember, David, you were confident
that he could deliver the performance, which he did.
It is funny sometimes how a really good episode can, the first time, fall flat.
This one left us all very concerned.
We didn't think we had gold on our hands.
It's hard for the day player actors who come in.
They're given about three hours to rehearse something
and are dealing with a cast that have been playing their parts for a year.
They have to catch up with the cast on just a few hours of rehearsal.
That title card, ''The Perils Of Refinement'',
was a scripted line in one of the scenes coming up,
but for time, we had to cut it, so we ended up using it as a title card.
Do you recall that? Didn't somebody have a line ''the perils of refinement'?
Later on, out in the hall, Frasier said it.
Well, he doesn't say it now.
No, he's not gay!
Peter Casey used to say when a farce is ready to roll, the gun is loaded.
One thing I do remember that we did in the editing of this...
There's an example. The look on Eric's face.
A lot of times there were scripted responses that Eric's character had.
In the editing, we realised you didn't need them.
You could go with the look on the face. I remember going through, in the editing,
and just snipping out a lot of ''Oh'' or ''Oh, really''.
You script those things because on the page you need them as signposts
and then you realise in performance that the look is doing the job for you.
Jane was very funny here with this action behind his back.
- Didn't it win an award from GLAAD? - Yes. A GLAAD media award.
GLAAD is the Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
and they were intrigued with this
because of the way that Joe managed to play with...
With stereotypes.
The underlying point is not all sissies are gay and not all gay men are sissies.
In the first year, a Iot of peopIe would say,
''Niles and Frasier are two gay lovers.
''You pretend they're brothers because you don't have the guts to write that.''
We went, ''No, they're heterosexual. Why do you think they're gay?''
And they'd say, ''They're refined, they like opera, fine music...''
And I went, ''Well, there's a nice set of stereotypes!''
I know some gay men who don't know anything about fine wine or food.
Here comes another place where we had a response and we cut it.
He said it all with that look.
This is where Joe's writing is so great.
As he said, the gun's loaded. You've set up everything.
Joe sets things up beautifully, so that you don't know you're being set up.
They don't sound like exposition.
It Iooks like you're just having a funny scene.
Bob Ellison, who was a consultant on the show, saw the episode and said,
''You know, there's not a wasted scene and not a wasted word.''
One of the great things is that things are either a setup or a payoff.
The fun of this kind of farce is getting a misperception rolling
and seeing how long you can credibly sustain it.
Not only that, but to complicate it.
Niles's entrance being the first major complication.
Sitting around a table, from a director's standpoint,
is the worst thing to do on a sitcom.
And most, not most, but a Iot of directors cheat it.
They have people sitting, Iike nobody ever sits.
Everybody sits on one side of the table facing the camera.
If you watch a sitcom and everybody sits on one side of the table,
you know that the director was lazy.
One of my pet peeves.
Coming up is probably one of the longest laughs we ever had in ''Frasier''.
We had to trim it down considerably.
David is so amazing. You just see...
You see every thought going through his facial expression.
Did I just talk through the funniest line?
They can always turn this off if they want to hear the episode.
That shot was done afterwards. We had to put in a false wall
and bring the camera up where the piano was.
Sometimes you hesitate to do that because it takes a Iittle extra time,
but I thought it was worth it.
There's a delicate part to get this misperception going.
You have to word things very carefully.
That's right. If he'd said the wrong word, the episode would have been over.
One of the things you see when a Iot of people attempt farce...
Joe's good because he knows this important thing about them
and that is, in order to sustain farce,
it has to keep getting better or more interesting as it goes along.
And it has to escalate.
Initially, one of the reasons the idea didn't go over was people could see
that you'd be repeating the same joke.
But what makes a farce are the ways you find to ratchet it up.
The fun was letting each character discover one by one the misperception,
with Frasier being the last one to find out.
One thing I wish I'd done differently
is I wish I'd done a pickup where I had a shot of David over Kelsey's shoulder,
shot through the door and I didn't do that.
I got a side shot at his face and I would have rather had a Iittle bit of eyes, but...
It's the only thing I would have done differently.
Perils of refinement came somewhere in here.
One of my favourite things in the episode
is the look Tom gives him when he walks in the door. This is coming up.
I don't think, on American television, you would ever have seen
one man give another man a look so freighted with sexual intent.
That would be the come-bleep-me look.
Speaking of being bleeped, I'm sure that last comment...
Kelsey plays it beautifully.
He does a great piece of physical business.
Kelsey came up with that and it was just right.
Semi-coquettish, yet embarrassed.
A lovely bit of business there.
I think it stretches reality just a tad,
but if Jane could pull that bra off, more power to her.
It's a great line.
I always wish I couId have found a better punch line here.
There was another scene between Frasier and Daphne.
We used it here for a tag, but it was actually a scene.
It's a rapprochement between them,
where Daphne, upset that things hadn't worked out,
was pleased Frasier had gone out of his way for her.
It's a step forward in their relationship. They're becoming friends.
I recall liking it, but in this show, we were really Iong. It just had to go.
- Thanks for listening. - This is David and Joe signing out.