How Frasier came to be

Over on Ken Levine's blog guest poster and Frasier co-creator, Peter Casey, explains how the show came to be. There's a second post about the serendipitous casting and a third on how Lisa Kudrow almost got the part of Roz.

Our biggest struggle after filming the pilot was cutting it down to time. We were something like six minutes long, which is a lot. We cut and cut and cut some more. We cut things we liked and we cut things we loved. Still, after 6 or 7 passes at the show we were still a minute long. We felt we had cut it to the bare bones. Any more cuts could damage the show so we went to Paramount with our dilemma. Thankfully, they agreed with us and asked NBC to give us some extra time. After viewing what we hoped would be our final cut, NBC agreed to give us that extra minute which was a very big favor. So, how do they come up with that extra minute of programming time for us? Don'’t think that all they have to do is cut a commercial or two. Are you crazy? That'’s money. No, to give us that extra minute, they asked the three other comedies and one drama on that Thursday night to each cut 15 seconds out of their programs. It's not something that'’s done very often and it's not something the network likes to do, but for that pilot of Frasier they felt it was worth it.

Photo: David Hyde Pierce and Kelsey Grammer in Frasier, created by Peter Casey, David Lee and David Angell.