Marisology

Whenever I see a dog like this I shout, “Maris!” Pity the neighborhood family with two of them.

Niles Crane has a girlfriend in Canada. You wouldn’t know her. She goes to another school.

Maris, ever-off-screen wife Maris, is key to Niles on Frasier. Niles definitely has a wife, she is very real, she’s just so slim and invisible and un-cast that you can’t see her. He’s so utterly indifferent to his wife, and she to him, that she is never around, never at family gatherings. Theirs is a marriage of convenience, of… distance. ‘Companionate’ wouldn’t cover it. It’s an opportunity for what is effectively a catchphrase. Niles saying why Maris can’t be at whichever event is like Mrs. Slocombe announcing the travails of her “pussy.” (Maris has a pet avatar as well, in Niles’s Maris stand-in whippet, “Lady.” His “lady.”)

All of this hit me when I rewatched (technically re-listened to while cleaning the house) the one where people think Niles has killed Maris, and in the midst of other farcical goings-on, he says, “My wife is alive, she's in Antwerp having her elbows done.”

Sure, Niles. Your wife.

It’s supposed to ruin a sitcom when the will-they-or-won’t-they couple get together. That is not the problem on Frasier. No, it’s that Daphne has to go from the role of basically a platonically adored diva to that of boring sitcom girlfriend, then wife, then pregnant wife. Niles, in turn, must switch from a character whose wife is a phantom to one with a flesh-and-blood wife in whom he is meant to seem interested.

While I don’t doubt David Hyde Pierce’s acting abilities, the trouble is that Niles, the Niles character we’ve known since day one, cannot have an on-screen wife. It doesn’t make sense for Niles. (Don’t get me started on the Mel plot.)

Someone—Matt Baume? whose book I still need to read—has surely already considered whether there’s something gay-permitting about the off-screen character in sitcoms where such matters are otherwise coded. Niles gets to be gay-but-not because Maris is-but-isn’t, existence-wise.

And then there’s Sheridan, from Keeping Up Appearances, who I realize I’d referred to before as being Maris-like but who is basically what if Niles but off-screen and therefore far more outlandish. The hyper-refined, more-expensive-than-they-can-afford tastes, like some kind of decadent aristocrat but in a mundane setting (1990s Seattle, the 1990s West Midlands whatever that is but it isn’t 19th century Paris).

Anyway I think the real point of this post is that the elbows-in-Antwerp line was so much better than anything in the Barbie movie. You wonder why I have a newsletter about TV shows from the 1990s? Have you considered that modern-day entertainment is a glorified toy ad that gestures at dismantling patriarchy? Maris did more to dismantle patriarchy than Barbie, of that much I’m sure.