The mind-blowing detail most Frasier fans definitely missed in hit 90s series-Rishma Dosani-Entertainment – Metro

Everything we knew about Frasier is actually a lie… (Picture: NBC)

There is one huge detail of Frasier that many will have missed, meaning we must rewatch the entire show immediately.

The acclaimed series aired for 11 seasons between 1993 – 2004, and won a whopping 37 Emmys in that time – it served as a spin-off of Cheers, following Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane as he swapped the dusty Boston bar for his hometown of Seattle.

The show focused on the stuffy psychiatrist reconnecting with his equally snooty brother, Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce) and their dad Martin (John Mahoney), while Peri Gilpin and Jane Leeves also made up the cast.

Although we’ve watched the entire program countless times, thanks to weekday morning repeats on Channel 4, casting director Jeff Greenberg dropped a huge bombshell about it more than 30 years on that we have somehow never picked up on.

Speaking to Metro, he shared that there has never been an ‘exterior’ shot in the entire 11-year run, meaning viewers have only ever seen the inside of his swanky Elliott Bay Towers apartment, the radio booth at KACL and his ‘sanctuary’ of Café Nervosa over the years.

Shedding light on why TV bosses decided against including additional shots of Seattle, he explained that they wanted to make things very different from Cheers.

Throughout the series, there were no exterior shots used (Picture: NBC)

We can’t even picture what Elliott Bay Towers must look like (Picture: NBC)

‘They were worried, initially, that the show would be compared to Cheers – which, of course, it would be,’ he told us. ‘So they decided, let’s change everything we possibly can think of, that is different from Cheers.

‘They moved Frasier to a different city so it didn’t have the flavor of Boston. They only had music for the main titles and the end titles, as opposed to interior music throughout the show, which is what Cheers did.

‘There were also no exterior shots of outside buildings, or anywhere outside, during Fraser. On Cheers, you’d always see the entrance to the bar, that staircase that went down, and different shots of Boston. You never did that [on Frasier].’

‘You never saw the Elliott Bay Towers – And it was a very conscious thing,’ he continued. ‘They added the title cards for Frasier that gave it another rhythm for the show.

We never even got a glimpse at the outside of KACL (Picture: NBC)

We only got a very rare glimpse outside Café Nervosa (Picture: NBC)

‘Adding Eddie the dog gave it a different flavor, they just kept adding in new and fresh things that were not on Cheers. It gave the show its own personality – with the common bond being Kelsey Grammer.’

Everything we thought we knew about Frasier and co is clearly a lie…

Over the years, there have been many questions about the shrink’s finances, and how he managed to afford such a stunning home – complete with a hat museum – on a radio host’s salary.

Unpacking the set further, executive producer Joe Keenan – who wrote several seasons of the show – explained that the seemingly luxurious set for Frasier’s Elliott Bay Towers apartment was anything but.

It turns out that the set of Frasier’s apartment ‘wasn’t that big’ (Picture: NBC)

‘We’ve lived on that set and it wasn’t that big,’ he informed us. ‘When you actually stepped onto the set, you were surprised at how much smaller it was to navigate than it looked on camera, and how narrow some of the passages were.

‘When you’re on the set itself, you said, “This is not a huge room!” His dining room only seated four people.’

‘That apartment, without that view, would not seem that astonishing,’ Joe insisted. ‘It was the view that made it seem fabulous – and the view doesn’t really exist. The view was taken from a vantage point where there is no building.’

Discussing those moments where Frasier and Niles left the confines of the regular sets and went ‘outside’, Joe recalled that it felt ‘weird’ for those behind the scenes to write those episodes.

The 1000th Show episode of the sitcom was mostly filmed on the streets of Seattle (Picture: NBC)

Joe shared why this was ‘weird’ for the writers to come up with (Picture: NBC)

Reflecting on the instalments, he opened up about the issues they faced writing for Hot Ticket in 1998, and The 1000th Show the previous year, which featured the siblings touring Seattle – and actually served as the 100th episode of the program.

‘When you put them outside, it always seemed a little odd to me,’ he recalled. ‘The heightened aspect of the characters – not just the performance or the acting – the characters, the behavior and what we wrote for them, always felt a little weird.

‘The scene when they’re in line, trying to get tickets, that was shot on the Paramount lot, outside the Paramount Theatre there. I wish we’d done it on a set.

‘And the 100th episode, where they’re walking around Seattle too, a lot of that felt weirder to me, to see them outdoors.’

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