In its eleven seasons on NBC, the "Cheers" spin-off "Frasier" has mostly managed to be very different from its predecessor. Where "Cheers" was mostly set in a Boston sports bar, "Frasier" was as much about the home life of the eponymous psychiatrist, who moved across the country to Seattle to host a radio show and care for his elderly. his father, after his hip injury, made it impossible for him to live alone. When the show wasn't taking place at his mansion or at the radio station where the show aired, Frazier and his even more flamboyant brother, Niles, were drinking espresso at a fancy Seattle coffee house.

It's true, of course, that a number of Cheers actors appeared at various points on "Frasier," but often only for one-episode runs who felt Frasier was different from them. it was about how different the show itself had become. But there was one way in which the two shows were very similar indeed. On "Cheers," the long-running gag involved the fact that stand-up guy Norm Peterson often talked about his wife, Vera, but nobody ever, you know i saw her. On "Frasier," while Niles was extremely different from Norm, he also had a wife (Marys) that the audience never once hinted at. But if things had turned out differently, we would have met Maris - and the producers had a specific actress in mind.

Maris Crane has been a source of extremely effective comedy since the pilot episode of "Frasier," and it's almost too easy to spend time just listing the various ways that the character was described without being seen. Frasier notes in an early episode that Maris likes him best “from a distance. You know, the way you love the sun. "Maris is like the sun... except without the heat." We learn that she is the heiress to the urinal fortune. We also know (courtesy of Nils' cop father, Martin) that Maris is a "thin ... a lot thin. And Caucasian...a lot Caucasian".

The number of wonderful excuses for why Niles always spends time with Frasier without his wife in the early seasons was always pretty brilliant, from Niles recounting an experience in which Maris asked for a goose near an Italian soccer team and "perhaps inevitably tragedy struck." to him, noting that she once "fell down on the bed in her half-sled and sighed." With those descriptions in mind, it makes sense that character actress Julia Duffy threw her hat into the ring at the start of the series to play Maris.

According to a massive and fascinating oral history of "Fraser" published several years ago by A vanity fairone of the show's creators noted that Duffy's agent had contacted the show's writers about her appearing as Maris. As Peter Casey recalled in that oral history, “Sometime in the first season, Julia Duffy's agent ... said she would like to play Maris. But until that moment, we felt it was better to remain unseen. a more ludicrous addition of new and outrageous descriptions.'

Casey is no doubt correct; it's a testament to the writing staff over 11 seasons that they were able to create such a vivid picture of a person we never saw but felt we knew all too well. But it's also kind of wild to consider Maris' character and realize that, honestly, Duffy would be pretty close to perfect as Maris if they ever decided to put her on screen.

Duffy, a 1970s TV veteran, was best known at the time for being a regular on the CBS sitcom Newhart (the one in which the late comic Bob Newhart ran a bed and breakfast, not the one in which he played a psychiatrist himself). And who played Duffy on Newhart? Oh, just a self-obsessed, haughty heiress whose cousin worked at a B&B. If anything, it could be argued that the casting would be too easy to slam dunk because of how well known Duffy is (who has received several Emmy nominations for her work on "Newhart") and how it could almost have been type casting .

It's not Duffy he couldn't have played Maris; from a visual standpoint, few people fit the bill better. But just as the Cheers writers always found it funnier to come up with ways to describe Norm's wife Vera without showing her too often, it was much funnier for the Frasier writers to come up with new ways to keep Maris . - screen, whether it's because she refuses to leave her bedroom, because she's in a hyperbaric chamber, or because she's sent her swordsman lover to deal with Nils. In fact, "Frasier" actually held the line better than "Cheers." The latter prove to be technical do show us Vera during the season five Thanksgiving episode turns into a food fight and it climaxes with Vera being smacked in the face just as she enters the frame.

It's good to know that someone I could they played Maris Crane, of course, but it's just as good to know that the show's producers and writers never had to put words in her mouth. That may have been one challenge too impossible to solve.