When Nazdravje ended in 1992, the original plan was not'for Kelsey Grammer to get her own Frasier Crane spin-off. Instead, "Cheers" writers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee developed a show about a paralyzed millionaire that would star Grammer, but NBC quickly turned them down. The network then advised the writing trio to further develop the character of Frasier Crane, and "Frasier" as we know it was born.

Except, there was a little more to it than that. It's fine to take a beloved character from Cheers and give him a spin-off, but since most of Dr. Crane's time on that original series was spent in the title strip, the real guess for his spin-off was no immediately obvious. What's more, the show's producers had a big concern for Grammer when Fraser first started.. The character was a little more edgy on "Cheers" than he ended up being on its spin-off, and at the time Angel, Casey and Lee weren't clear on how to transition Frasier from ensemble member to leading man.

Interestingly enough, the idea that Frasier ended up starting his own series didn't come from completely abandoning his Cheers origins. Instead, it came from taking an unused story from that beloved sitcom and pairing it with a real-life example.

David Hyde Pearce thought the Fraser pilot was terrible at firstmainly because the show seemed to have two of the same characters in Frasier and his brother, Nils. But it didn't take long for Pierce to show up, as the series basically arrived fully formed. That pilot, titled The Good Son , was remarkable for the way it established the "Pofrazena" magic right off the bat, especially when compared to many other shows that take a while to get into all the momentum.

Getting to that point, however, took some work. In an interview for Television Academy Foundation"Frasier" co-creator David Lee talked about how the show went through several iterations before he, David Angel and Peter Casey landed on a scrapped story from their "Cheers" days as the basis for the "Frasier" spin-off. As Lee explained:

"We remembered that on Cheers we'd been trying to do an idea we had for years, where Frasier got a job as a radio psychologist, an on-air problem-solving guy. "We could never crack the story on 'Cheers,' but we started thinking about it again, and so we started putting together a show where Frasier would be a radio psychologist."

That unused story idea proved to be the spark needed to set the "Frasier" machine in motion. But that was just part of the process.

After David Lee, Peter Casey and David Angell got their premise, thanks to a leftover Cheers idea, they decided they needed some real experience from radio psychiatrists. So, as Lee explained to the Television Academy Foundationthe group visited KABC in Los Angeles to watch on-air personality Dr. David Wiscott. As Lee recalls:

“We went to KABC here in Los Angeles and we looked at — the guy has since passed away now — Dr. David Wiscott. "He used to be a radio psychologist here in the LA area and we used to watch his program."

Interestingly enough, Lee claimed that Dr. Wiscott was "really weird," though he didn't explain why. The psychiatrist, who Los Angeles Times called one of the "pioneers of on-air counseling," began hosting his KABC talk show in 1980 and remained on the air until 1993, the year "Frasier" debuted. Interestingly, during the DVD commentary track for The Simpsons episode "No Shame Like Home," Matt Groening revealed that Wiscott was partially the inspiration for the character of the show's counselor, Dr. Marvin Monroe.

For Lee, Angel and Casey, Wiscott's show gave them an insight into how a real radio show works, allowing them to write Frasier as a much more believable on-air shrink. Lee summed up the KABC visit by saying, "We just got a sense of, 'Okay, here's the producer, okay, there's another character, and there's other people on other shows wandering around the periphery.' In that visit to LA. The radio station, then, located the origins of not only the lead version of Frasier, but all of the now-beloved characters that populated Seattle's KACL talk radio. in Fraser.