Why David Hyde Pierce Thought He Was a ‘Moron’ for Agreeing to Star in ‘Frasier’
Without David Hyde Pierce, Frasier would have just been, well, the new Frasier.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine the classic sitcom minus Pierce, who won four Emmy Awards for playing Fraiser’s younger brother Dr. Niles Crane.
But oddly enough, the actor once admitted that he briefly regretted taking on the role after reading the show’s pilot script.
Don't Miss
Giving Frasier a brother wasn’t always part of the show’s plan. After abandoning the whole “Kelsey Grammer plays a paralyzed media mogul” idea, Grammer was convinced to revive his lovably pompous Cheers psychiatrist for his first solo TV outing. But according to The Frasier Companion by Jefferson Graham, the last thing producers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee wanted “was to give Frasier a brother.”
Why? Because they had just made a sitcom about two brothers: Wings.
But then a casting director randomly stumbled upon a headshot of David Hyde Pierce, and couldn’t help but notice that he was a dead ringer for a young Grammer, and would therefore make a perfect younger brother. The producers were still skeptical about the idea, but came to be impressed by Pierce’s work in the “short-lived NBC sitcom” The Powers That Be.
So Pierce was invited to meet the producers, even though they hadn’t actually created the new character yet. “When we met with him, we didn’t have a script to show him, so we just said that Niles was a psychiatrist like Frasier, only stuffier,” Casey admitted.
After their 45-minute meeting, Pierce accepted the gig, even though his part hadn’t been written yet. “When I agreed to the show, I had not yet seen a script,” Pierce explained in the Channel 4 documentary The Frasier Story. “They offered me the job, I knew what the part was, I knew some of the people involved.”
But his feelings about the project took a turn when he read through the first episode. “When I finally saw the pilot (script), which was called ‘The Good Son’ I read it and thought, ‘Well, I have to agreed to something, and I was a moron.’ Because I read my part and I thought, ‘Well, they’ve just written another Frasier here. Why would they have two characters who are so similar? Which shows you what I know.”
It’s true that Niles Crane was, initially, more like the early Cheers-era of Frasier than he was his own character, but Grammer actually saw this as a plus. “David is the old Frasier,” Grammer said during the show’s run. “My Frasier is somebody else now.”
Of course, Niles eventually evolved beyond simply being a Frasier clone, and became his own unique TV personality/retro video game character.
