I Can Ý Ü Ø] Ú [™È œ˜\ÚY\‹ˆ H Ø[d Stop Thinking About Maris.

[Ubiquitous]

Frasier, you might have heard, has been enjoying a renaissance. That's
partly for logistical reasons-the NBC sitcom has been streaming on
Netflix, introducing its antics to a new generation of viewers-but it's
also for artistic ones: Despite its mid-'90s vintage, the show is
extremely well-calibrated to this moment. The misadventures of Frasier
Crane, talk-radio psychiatrist, are soothing. The show's rhythms are
soft and soporific. Frasier combines theatrical absurdity with earnest
emotion. Its anxieties are slight, its stakes low. "Frasier," The
Ringer's Kate Knibbs wrote in 2017, "is neither aspirational nor
relevant, but rather pleasantly restorative-the modern binge-viewing
equivalent of a much-needed bath."

Frasier, tragically, is leaving Netflix at the end of December, and
I've been watching the show before it makes its departure from the
platform. As I get in those views, I keep getting distracted by a
character who isn't there: Maris. Niles's wife is technically part of
the Crane family. But she is definitely not, in the show's estimation,
a real member of the Crane family. You know that primarily because
Maris spends all 11 seasons of Frasier invisible to viewers: In the
manner of Mrs. Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory, Peggy's mother in
Married . With Children, and Vera in Cheers, Maris is often talked
about but never seen.

I watched Frasier when I was younger, but I never gave Maris much
thought. That is probably because the show itself suggests that Maris
does not deserve much thought. She is not a character so much as she is
a collection of punchlines: about her appearance (she is, Frasier's
characters imply, excessively skinny), about her class (she is, they
imply, excessively rich), about all that can happen when extreme self-
consciousness collides with extreme wealth. She is proof that it is in
fact entirely possible to be too rich and too thin.

Watching the show again, though-as an adult, in 2019-I keep finding
myself thinking about Maris. I keep thinking about how uncomfortably
her character sits within Frasier's velveteen warmth. Sitcoms are
constrained universes, small in their scope and narrow in their
sympathies; that is the promise they make to their viewers. Frasier
embraced that brevity, which gave the show its bubbly and bath-y
quality: the same people, basically, rearranged on the same board,
episode after episode. The show ran on the fuel of familiarity. It
filtered out the world beyond its fictional borders. It was, in today's
terms, a curated collection.

But sitcoms are also products of their times, whether they self-
consciously accept that fact or not. Frasier premiered on NBC in 1993,
soon after Seinfeld and a little before Friends-and right in the middle
of a time of particularly lurching transition in American culture. The
show made its debut just after Bill Clinton won the presidency in part
because of the rebuke he claimed to offer to the greed-is-good excesses
of Reaganism. It arrived amid intense cultural and political backlash
to the women's movement.

Maris, in many ways, functions as Frasier's acknowledgement of that
context. You could read her as a running joke-as a low-stakes gag in a
show that was full of them. You could read her, too, as evidence that
Frasier's defining kindness had a mean streak. But you could also read
her as an argument: that Frasier, a show that delights in the antics of
rich people, understood that wealth had its dark side. She is a human
caveat. The show takes for granted that Frasier and Niles, who collect
pomposities as readily as they collect French wines, deserve to be
teased for their affectations. But Frasier makes Maris into something
of a monstrosity. Watch enough episodes, and her absence begins to look
less like a gag and more like a trick: a way for the show to make jokes
that could not be directed at an embodied woman.

Maris was not meant to be missing, originally. Not permanently, anyway.
She was originally going to be missing only for the first few episodes
of the show-a winking callback to Vera on Cheers, and a playful
recognition of the fact that Frasier had begun its life as a spinoff.
David Lee, the show's co-creator, explained the thinking like this:
"Let's do that for a few episodes, and then, `Surprise!'-we're actually
going to see her, so we weren't ripping off that Cheers thing after
all."

But then a problem emerged: Frasier's writers had, even by that early
point, so laden Maris with jokes-some of them about her dour
personality, but most of them about her slight body-that they had made
it logistically impossible for a human woman to portray her. "Two or
three episodes in, she was already so bizarre, she was uncastable," Lee
said. "So we just went, `Well, we're never going to see her.' Although
we did see the shadow of her behind a shower curtain once."

What the show's writers did instead will be familiar to anyone who has
watched the show: The writers took Maris's absurdity and ran with it.
She became an experiment without a control. A German acquaintance who
meets Maris in the show describes her, in absentia, as
"Nichteinmenschlichfrau"-a "not quite hooman vooman."

You're supposed to laugh at all this. And I do! Frasier, at one point,
refers to Maris as "ounces of fun," and it's a good joke-just as it's a
good joke when he compares his sister-in-law to a bag of flour:
"bleached, 100 percent fat-free, and best kept in an air-tight
container." The lines work, in part, because they're low-stakes.

Lilith, by contrast-Frasier's ex-wife, and Maris's most direct
counterpart on the show-becomes notably more human as the show goes on.
She becomes more complex as a character, expanded rather than reduced.
That's mostly because Bebe Neuwirth is such a richly compelling actor,
able to bring warmth even to Lilith's defining coldness. It is also,
however, because of the simple fact of Lilith's personhood. Even when
you are a show that marries Vaudevillian whimsy with the cadences of
the sitcom, you can spend only so much time making fun of a character
to her face before the jokes start to wear thin.

Meanwhile, Maris's absence doubles as a kind of permission. While
Frasier mocks her for her looks and for what is pretty clearly an
eating disorder, the jokes don't typically register as cruelty,
because, strictly speaking, they aren't ever directed at anyone.

Frasier premiered during the height of the backlash to the women's
movement, as Susan Faludi frames it, and you can see the show reckoning
with that fact most clearly through the character you cannot see. Maris
is a creature of the backlash. The primary fact Frasier's viewers know
about Maris Crane is that she is thin. And her thinness makes her, the
show argues, weak. The jokes about this fact accumulate: She can't wear
earrings because their weight makes her neck droop. She once sprained
her wrist from holding a cracker laden with too much dip. Attempting to
stomp grapes to make wine, she found herself unable to crush a single
fruit. She makes no tracks in the snow. She had youthful dreams of
becoming a ballerina, but could never manage to get her weight up. A
disgruntled servant once left a whoopee cushion on Maris's dining room
chair, aiming for revenge. "Fortunately for all of us," Niles says,
recounting the incident, "embarrassment was averted when my little fawn
proved too light to activate it."

So Maris works, in a way, as a warning. American culture tells women to
take up less space; Maris, complying, shrinks herself. Women see that
they will be judged primarily according to the appeal of their bodies;
Maris tries, in vain, to purchase her way into beauty. That she tries
too hard, cares too much, is the show's ultimate joke about Maris. It's
considerably less funny than the others.

That's not necessarily to defend Maris as a character. She is not the
witch of Wicked, mistold and thus misunderstood. She is certainly not
the Mrs. Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea. Maris, as the show presents
her personality, is selfish; she's hyperbolic; she's the kind of person
that Frasier, were someone to call into his radio show with a complaint
about her, might describe as "toxic."

Maris is also a horrible snob-not in the relatively lighthearted manner
of Frasier and Niles, with their affected affinities for Wagner and
cashmere, but in a more sinister way. Maris truly thinks she is better
than other people: that her wealth is not an accident of birth, but
rather a ratification of life's hierarchies. Frasier's premiere also
coincided with a time when American sitcoms were still trying to
interrogate class, and Maris-the-heiress was one way of signaling to
audiences that the show was in on its own jokes. Frasier wasn't
celebrating this rich guy and his rich brother; it was laughing at
them, too. You know that because the show was making regular fun of the
richest of its characters, a woman who would be reminiscent of Marie
Antoinette had her intense fear of carbs not kept her from eating cake.

Often, in these collisions, the jokes told about Maris can take on the
suggestion of punishment. Late in the show's run, Maris's greatest fear
befalls her: Depressed after she and Niles finally divorce, she gains
weight. "Look, you see that rotund woman coming out of Chock Full o'
Donuts?" Niles says to Frasier and Roz. "Watch. Before she gets to her
car, she'll finish that bear claw, and then go back in-this is her
third time."

Roz is offended at Niles's superficiality. "It's rude," she says.

"It's childish," Frasier adds.

"It's Maris," Niles says.

In the last major arc Maris had on the show, she murdered her new
boyfriend, an Argentinian polo player-in self-defense, she claimed. Her
final "appearance" in the show found her locked away in a sensory-
deprivation chamber-sipping a diet drink administered by her faithful
maid, Marta, through a hole in the chamber wall. And then, audiences
soon learned, she fled the U.S., escaping to a private island from
which she would not face extradition. Frasier's invisible character was
sentenced to hiding, still, in plain sight.

It is an ending that is fittingly lacking in dignity for a character
who was never given any. But what's notable about Maris is that,
whatever else she was, she was also correct. The assumption that
informed nearly everything she did on the show, from her diets to her
surgeries to her final escape, was that the world was not interested in
who she really was. That it was, in fact, judgmental and impatient.
Maris was Frasier's evidence that femininity was funny, under the right
conditions, but the show was also evidence that her fears were real. It
made a running joke of her defining trait: her ability to disappear.

More than 20 years later, that joke itself chafes. Frasier's dismissal
of Maris-the-heiress, its appointed villain, may be aligned, in some
ways, with the era of cancel billionaires; its mockery of her may well
make arguments that anticipated the current moment. But Maris's
absence, in the end, feels out of step and out of place. It feels
extremely dated. One of the ethics of this social media age is the idea
that authorship is its own kind of dignity. People have a right to tell
their own stories, on their own terms, in their own words. Frasier, a
show about a radio psychiatrist that aired on network television, is
rooted in the logic of broadcast. Its notions of authorship are one-
directional. Maris is a reminder of that.

It's silly, in one way, to think about Maris, this character who is
meant to be forgotten, but in another way it's difficult not to. She is
a question with no answer, a rumor with no story. Maybe she's as
terrible as her in-laws say she is. Maybe she's even worse. But I
wonder what she might say for herself when others aren't doing the
speaking for her.


--
"We need to impeach the President to find out what crime he committed."
- Nancy Pelosi