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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9632759" data-attributes="member: 6799660">TiQuinn -- I know a few other people that have said they re-watch Frasier too. I  really meant 'get brought up in discussion' as my metric under examination. Everyone watches what they watch, but people are still talking about Friends and Seinfeld. There are still entertainment journalism articles being written about Seinfeld. Friends had a reunion (checks. oh, wow, four years ago) where they just talked about the show and it became the channel's highest rated thing ever. Frasier, which was almost as big as these two, don't get that. Other than when John Mahoney passed or the occasional person surprised by Grammer's politics (and something something an ex of his was a real housewives of somewhere, I think?), I haven't really heard about Frasier since it was on the air*. That's what I'm bringing up, and that feels different to me**. Like, for the 70s I  don't think M*A*S*H and All in the Family get that much more continued cultural cache than Brady Bunch and Mary Tyler Moore, or vice-versa. *Re: the reboot--I literally heard there was going to be a reboot, and next time I looked up, it was two seasons in and being cancelled, and I hadn't even realized it had happened.  **but again I'll have to think about it.Interesting but unsurprising. It was treated as... I don't know the word for it-- one of those tag-along shows that fills out the primetime tv block for a network. Similar to how Just Shoot Me and Suddenly Susan filled out nights with Friends and/or Frasier. You may have liked or disliked them, but you knew the networks weren't supporting them the way they were their flagship shows. I would be absolutely unsurprised if <whatever platform you saw the U. S. shows you did see in the 90s> didn't have it on, or didn't advertise it as must-watch-television. Hmmm. I think I see the thread you are pulling at, and trying to decide if I agree. Home Improvement and Raymond are decidedly more family-sitcom-y than the rest and I think that complicates the situation. Raymond certainly has a lot more acerbic bite than Full House or the Nanny. Fresh Prince is also kind of 'transgressive to a teen.' It was a lot less mean-spirited than Seinfeld or Friends let themselves* be (provided you consider Uncle Phil's routine attempted homicide to be lighthearted fun). Mad About You deliberately** hamstrung itself by constraining itself to 'things you would really believe real couples would say in real conversation,' meaning it could have the 'neurotic New Yorkers' vibe of Seinfeld, but not the comedic acidity. *or decided they had to be. Despite surpassing Seinfeld in the ratings (and eventually outliving it), I guess Friends never escaped the notion of trying to 'be more like Seinfeld,' which is where a lot of the 'did you realize that the characters on friends are actually kinda horrible?'-type articles you see pop up on content aggregator sites.**Paul Reiser's discussion about this on the Inside of You podcast on Youtube is fascinating.I guess my issue with this pattern/theory is that some (such as Raymond) of the still-discussed shows in barely fit the pattern, and there are lots of shows of the era that exemplified it more (Caroline in the City, Just Shoot Me, Unhappily Ever After) that are, if not forgotten, certainly in the low tier of still-remembered. Maybe that's because most of them are in the same 'tagalong show' bin I put Wings in.  Spin City had some bite to it. Not Seinfeld-level, but certainly Fresh Prince/Newsradio/Drew Carey-level. Certainly Alan Ruck's* sex-pest character and his vitriolic best-bud relationship with Michael Boatman's gay straight man had some 'aren't we transgressive?' vibes. *side note: I watched the entire Michael J Fox era of that show without realizing that that was Cameron from Ferris Bueller. Ten years turned him from a milquetoast teenager into a prematurely grey scoundrel. </blockquote>

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