The actress who almost played Niles Crane’s wife Maris on Frasier

During its eleven seasons on NBC, the “Cheers” spin-off series “Frasier” managed to be very different from its predecessor. While “Cheers” mostly took place in a sports bar in Boston, “Frasier” also dealt with the home life of the eponymous psychiatrist who moved across the country to Seattle to host a phone-in TV show and care for his elderly father after a hip injury left him unable to for him live alone. When the show wasn’t happening in his palatial apartment or at the radio station where the show was being broadcast, Frazier and his even more exhausted brother Niles were sipping espressos at a posh Seattle coffee shop.

It’s certainly true that a number of actors from “Cheers” appeared in various places on “Frasier,” but often only for separate episodes that felt just how different Frasier the man was from them. it was about how different the show itself had become. But there was one way in which the two shows were indeed very similar. In “Cheers,” a running joke was that the mess Norm Peterson often talked about his wife, Vera, but nobody ever you know saw her. Although Niles was very different from Norm on Frasier, he also had a wife (Marys) that viewers never got to see. But if everything had turned out differently, we would have met Maris — and the producers had a specific actress in mind.

Maurice Crane has been a source of extremely effective comedy since the pilot episode of Frasier, and it’s too easy to waste time listing the various ways in which the character was described without being seen. Frasier notes in an early episode that he likes Maris best “from afar. You know, the way you like the sun. Maris is like the sun … only without the heat.” We learn that she is the heir to the urinal estate. We also know (courtesy of Niles’ father, Martin) that Maris is “skinny… very thin. And Caucasian…very Caucasian”.

The number of wonderful excuses for why Niles always hangs out with Frasier without his wife in the early seasons has always been pretty brilliant, from Niles talking about when Maris asked for a goose near the Italian soccer team and “perhaps the inevitable tragedy struck” to his , noting that she once “fell down on the bed in her half-hair and sighed.” Given these descriptions, it makes sense that character actress Julia Duffy threw her hat into the ring early in the series to play Maris.

According to the massive and fascinating oral history of “Frasier” published several years ago Fair of vanityone of the show’s creators noted that Duffy’s agent contacted the show’s writers to have her appear as Maris. As Peter Casey recalls in this oral history, “Sometime in the first season, Julia Duffy’s agent … said she would like to play Maris. But until that moment, we thought that it was better that she was not noticed. it’s funnier to add new and outrageous descriptions.”

Casey is undoubtedly right; it shows that over the course of 11 seasons, the writers were able to create such a vivid picture of a man we’d never seen but felt we knew all too well. But it’s also kind of wild to look at the character of Maris and realize that honestly, Duffy would be close to perfect as Maris if they ever decided to bring her to the screen.

Duffy, a television stalwart since the 1970s, was best known at the time for being a regular on the CBS sitcom Newhart (the one in which the late comic Bob Newhart runs the bed and breakfast, not the one in which he starred psychiatrist). And who did Duffy play in Newhart? Oh, just an obsessed, arrogant heiress whose cousin worked at a B&B. If anything, you could say the casting would have been too easy because Duffy was a household name (who received multiple Emmy nominations for her work on Newhart ) and because it could almost have been typecast.

This is not the Daffy could not Maris played; from a visual perspective, few fit the bill better. But just as the writers of “Cheers” always found it funnier to think of ways to describe Norma Vera’s wife without showing her too often, the writers of “Frasier” found it much funnier to think of new ways to keep Maurice off-screen, or because she refuses to leave her bedroom. , or because she’s in a hyperbaric chamber, or she sent her beloved swordsman to deal with Niles instead. In fact, “Frasier” actually held the line better than “Cheers.” The latter is shown technically did show us Faith in the season five Thanksgiving episode turns into a food fight and the climactic moment where Vera is stabbed in the face as soon as she enters the frame.

It’s nice to know that someone could of course, played by Maurice Crane, but it’s no less nice to know that the show’s producers and writers never had to put words in her mouth. Maybe it was a problem that couldn’t be solved.