In its eleventh season on NBC, the “Cheers” spin-off “Frasier” managed to be very different from its predecessor. Where “Cheers” took place mostly in a Boston theater, “Frasier” was about the home life of a famous psychologist, who moved across the country to Seattle to host a radio show and care for his elderly. When my father injured his hip, it prevented him from being alone. When the show wasn’t taking place in his mansion or on the television where the show aired, Frasier and his more successful brother Niles were sipping espressos at Seattle’s best coffee house.

It’s true, of course, that several actors from “Cheers” have appeared in different roles on “Frasier,” but they usually only make one scene that makes it clear how different Frasier was from them. it was about how the show changed. But there was one way in which the two shows were very similar. On “Cheers,” a long track includes the fact that Norm Peterson often talks about his wife Vera, but nobody, you know, he saw he. On “Frasier,” although Niles was very different from Norm, he also had a wife (Maris) whom the audience had never seen. But if things had turned out differently, we would have met Maris – and the producers were interested in the actress.

Maris Crane has been the source of the best drama ever since the pilot of “Frasier,” and it’s easy to just take the time to write different ways the behavior was described without being observed. Frasier notes in an early episode that Maris is loved “from afar. You know, the way you love the sun. Maris is like the sun…except without the heat.” We learn that he is the successor to his pee luck. We also know (courtesy of Niles Martin’s cop dad) that Maris is “thin… very much thin. And Caucasian…very much Caucasian.”

The number of happy reasons that Niles spent all the time with Frasier without his wife in the first seasons was very obvious, from Niles explaining that Maris asked a goose near the Italian football team and “perhaps, disaster followed” for him realizing that at one point he “fell down on the edge of the bed and sighed.” With that in mind, it makes sense that actress Julia Duffy threw her hat in the ring early on in the show to play Maris.

According to the extensive and entertaining oral history of “Frasier” published several years ago by Nonsense Fairone of the show’s producers reported that Duffy’s agent had contacted the show’s writers to appear as Maris. As Peter Casey recalls in an oral history, “Somewhere in the first season, assistant Julia Duffy … said she would love to play Maris. funny and added new and sinister details.”

Casey is undoubtedly right; it’s a testament to the season 11 cast that they were able to create such a vivid portrait of someone we’ve never seen before but feel we know so well. But it’s also interesting to think about Maris and realize that, honestly, Duffy would have been much closer to Maris if they had decided to put him on screen.

Duffy, who has been on TV since the 1970s, was best known at the time for being a regular on the CBS sitcom “Newhart” (in which the late actor Bob Newhart ate at a bed-and-breakfast, not his own. He played a psychiatrist) . And who played Duffy on “Newhart”? Oh, the arrogant, arrogant man whose cousin worked at the B&B. If anything, you could say that the casting was easier because of Duffy’s popularity (having earned multiple Emmy nominations for her work on “Newhart”) and the way it would have represented it.

That’s not Duffy he didn’t finish played Maris; in hindsight, few people fit the bill. But just as it was always fun for the writers on “Cheers” to think of ways to explain Norm’s wife Vera without showing her often, it was more fun for the writers of “Frasier” to think of new ways to keep Maris from leaving. -screen, either because he refuses to leave his room, because he’s in a hyperbaric chamber, or he’s sent a swordsman to fight Niles instead. In fact, “Frasier” held the line better than “Cheers.” The latter shows technically he said show us Vera in the fifth episode of Thanksgiving itself they start fighting with food and it culminates with Vera hanging on her face as soon as she enters the frames.

It’s good to know that someone he can he played Maris Crane, of course, but it’s good to know that the producers and writers of the show didn’t have to put words in his mouth. That would be one insurmountable problem.