During its eleven seasons on NBC, the “Cheers” spin-off “Frasier” managed to stand out greatly from its predecessor. While “Cheers” was largely set in a Boston sports bar, “Frasier” was just as much about the home life of its eponymous psychiatrist, who traveled across the country to Seattle to host a radio show and take care of of its elderly people. father after a hip injury prevented him from living alone. When the show wasn’t taking place in his lavish apartment or at the radio station where the show aired, Frasier and his even more self-effacing brother, Niles, were sipping espressos at a posh Seattle cafe.

It’s true, of course, that a number of “Cheers” actors appeared at various points in “Frasier,” but often just for one-off, single-episode appointments that reflected as much of the difference between Frasier and the person of them. it was about how different the show itself had become. But there was one point in which the two series were indeed very similar. On “Cheers”, a long gag involved the fact that barfly Norm Peterson often talked about his wife Vera, but no one ever, you know, saw her. In “Frasier”, although Niles was extremely different from Norm, he too had a wife (Maris) that the audience never saw once. But if things had gone differently, we would have met Maris – and the producers had a specific actress in mind.

Maris Crane was an extremely effective source of comedy from the pilot episode of “Frasier,” and it’s almost too easy to spend time listing the various ways in which the character was described without being seen. Frasier noting in an early episode that Maris is more liked “by far. You know, how you like the sun. Maris is like the sun… except without the heat.” We learn that she is the heiress to a fortune in urinal cakes. We also know (thanks to Niles’ police officer father, Martin) that Maris is “thin… very thin. And Caucasian…very Caucasian.”

The number of delightful excuses for why Niles still 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 “can -inevitably, tragedy ensued.” to him, noting that she once “slumped down on the bed in her half-underpants and sighed.” With these descriptions in mind, it makes sense that actress Julia Duffy threw her hat into the ring early in the series to play Husbands.

Based on a massive and fascinating oral history of “Frasier” published a few years ago by Vanity Fairone of the show’s creators noted that Duffy’s agent had contacted the show’s writers about having her appear as Maris. As Peter Casey recalls in this oral history: “Somewhere in the first season, Julia Duffy’s agent…said she would love to play Maris. But at that point we thought it was better that she wasn’t seen. funnier by adding new and scandalous descriptions. “

Casey is undoubtedly right; it’s a testament to the writing team over 11 seasons that they were able to create such a vivid picture of someone we’d never seen but felt like we knew all too well . But it’s also kind of crazy to consider the character of Maris and realize that, honestly, Duffy would have been almost perfect as Maris if they ever decided to put her on screen.

Duffy, a television mainstay since the 1970s, was best known at the time for being a regular on the CBS sitcom “Newhart” (the one in which the late comedian Bob Newhart runs a bed and breakfast, not the one in which he himself played a psychiatrist). And who did Duffy play in “Newhart”? Oh, just an obsessed, haughty heiress whose cousin worked at the B&B. If anything, one could argue that the casting would be too easy due to Duffy’s notoriety (having earned a handful of Emmy nominations for his work on “Newhart”) and the fact that it almost could have been a casting call.

That’s not it Duffy I couldn’t I played Maris; from a visual standpoint, few do the job better. But just as it was always funnier for the “Cheers” writers to think of ways to depict Vera, Norm’s wife, without showing her too often, it was a lot funnier for the “Frasier” writers to think to new ways to keep Maris away. -screen, whether it’s because she refuses to leave her room, because she’s in a hyperbaric chamber, or because she sent her swordsman lover to deal with Niles instead. In fact, “Frasier” held up better than “Cheers.” The latter technically show did show us Vera during a season five Thanksgiving episode that turns into a food fight and culminates with Vera getting punched in the face just as she enters the frame.

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