The actress who almost played Neil Crane's wife Marisa in Frasier

Throughout its eleven seasons on NBC, the “Cheers” spinoff “Frasier” has mostly managed to be very different from its predecessor. If “Cheers” was mostly set in a sports bar in Boston, “Frasier” was as much about the home life of the eponymous psychiatrist who moved to Seattle to host a radio show and take care of his elderly. his father wouldn't let him live alone after a hip injury. When the show wasn't in his fancy apartment or at the radio station where the show aired, Frazier and his even more powerful brother, Neil, were sipping espresso at a fancy Seattle cafe.

Of course, it's true that a number of the cast members of “Cheers” appeared at various points on “Frasier,” but often only in one-episode cameos that felt as different as Frasier was 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. In his “Cheers” long gag included the fact that barman Norm Peterson often talked about his wife Vera, but nobody ever you know saw her. In Frasier, although Niels was very different from Norma, he also had a wife (Maris) that the audience never looked at. But if things had worked out differently, we would have met Mari – and the producers had a specific actress in mind.

Maris Crane was a source of extremely effective comedy back in the “Frasier” pilot, and it's almost too easy to spend time listing the various ways the character was described without being seen. Fraser noted in an early episode that Maris is best liked “from a distance. You know how you like the sun. Maris is like the sun… except without the heat.” We learn that she is the heir to the urinal cake fortune. We also know (courtesy of Neil's policeman father Mārtis) that Maris is “thin … very thin And the Caucasian…very Caucasian.”

The many delightful excuses for Neal always hanging out with Frasier without his wife at the beginning of the season were always pretty brilliant, with Neal recounting an experience where Maris begged for a goose near the Italian soccer team and “perhaps inevitably tragedy struck.” with him noting that she once “half-slid onto the bed and sighed.” Given these descriptions, it makes sense that actress Julie Duffy threw her hat into the ring to play Marie early on in the show.

According to a massive and fascinating oral history of “Frasier” published a few years ago Vanity Fairone of the show's creators noted that Duffy's agent had contacted the show's writers about her appearing as Mara. As Peter Casey recalls in this oral history, “Somewhere in the first season, Julie Duffy's agent…said she'd love to play Marisa. But by then we felt it would be better if she remained unseen. It was much funnier to add new and cruel descriptions.”

Casey is undoubtedly right; it's a testament to the writers over 11 seasons that they were able to create such a vivid picture of a person we never saw but felt all too familiar with. But it's also weird to consider Marisa's character and realize that, honestly, Duffy would have been an almost perfect Marisa if they ever decided to put him on screen.

Duffy, a television fixture since the 1970s, was best known at the time for playing himself on the CBS sitcom Newhart (the one in which the late comic Bob Newhart runs the bed and breakfast, not the one he's been a regular on). psychiatrist). And who did Duffy play in “Newhart”? Oh, just an obsessed, arrogant heiress whose cousin worked at a boarding house. If anything, it could be said that the casting would be too easy because of Duffy's familiarity (having earned a few Emmy nominations for her work on “Newhart”) and the fact that it could almost have been typewriting.

That's not Duffy could not have played Mari; from a visual standpoint, some 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 actually showing her too often, the “Frasier” writers found it much funnier to come up with new ways to keep Marie away. – screen, either 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 Neal. In fact, “Frasier” held the line better than “Cheers.” The latter shows technically did show us Vera in the season five Thanksgiving episode turns into a food fight and climaxes when Vera is punched in the face just as she enters the frame.

It's good to know that someone could has played Marie Crane, sure, but it's just as good to know that the show's producers and writers never had to put words in her mouth. This might have been one challenge too impossible to solve.