Fans Debate Whether or Not Frasier Crane Was the Worst Dad in TV History
Dr. Frasier Crane is known for his psychiatric expertise, his refined taste and his penchant for hosting implausibly farcical dinner parties. But for some fans, Frasier’s most defining characteristic will always be his dogshit parenting.
On Reddit, one Frasier devotee outlined a fairly convincing case for why Dr. Crane is, in fact, “TV’s worst dad.” The user points out that while other fatherly main characters, like Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin and Frank from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have behaved worse, at least they were “present.” Frasier, on the other hand, abandoned his three-year-old son, Freddy, and moved across the country in order to… pursue a career in AM radio? That’s only slightly better than going out for a pack of cigarettes and never returning.
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Over the course of 11 seasons of the show, we only saw Freddy a grand total of nine times. And Frasier rarely even seemed to talk to his son on the phone. As the post argues, “because Frasier has the means to see his son even at a distance, a background that would allow him to work anywhere, a relationship with his ex that is stable enough to co-parent, and a profession where he literally shames other failing parents on air, Frasier is perhaps the worst sitcom dad ever.”
As we’ve mentioned before, the reason for Frasier’s sudden child neglect is that star Kelsey Grammer was worried that a child actor would become the “focus of the show” (ironically, he still ended up sharing the spotlight with a dog). This explains why Frasier bolted for Seattle. But, come to think of it, even back in his Cheers days, Frasier wasn’t exactly the ideal dad. For example, he dragged his infant son to a windowless bar so many times that Freddy’s first word was literally “Norm.”
Some fans on Reddit, however, took issue with this characterization. “I was always under the impression that Frasier visited Freddy a lot, we just never saw it,” one person wrote. “There are a few episodes where Frasier leaves to visit Freddy.”
Someone else backed up this idea by actually crunching the numbers and concluding that “out of Frasier's 365-day year, we see 12 hours,” which would conceivably leave lots of time to call Freddy and/or travel to Boston. “This post is a classic example of someone looking too hard into something that really isn’t there,” another suggested.
And, to be fair, Frasier does spend quite a lot of time with his son on the reboot series — and we all know how that turned out.
