Dr. Frasier Crane

Newly divorced and returned to his native Seattle, Frasier Crane restarts his life as a radio psychiatrist, doling out advice to callers with more polish than self-awareness. He moves his gruff, injured father Martin into his sleek new apartment, and the friction between his cultivated tastes and his family's plainer ones begins immediately. He wants dignity, and rarely gets it.

Grammer plays pomposity as a survival strategy rather than a flaw to be scolded out of him, so every collapse of Frasier's self-image lands as comedy built on real vulnerability. The writing lets him be genuinely brilliant and genuinely ridiculous in the same breath, and that contradiction, delivered with such exacting verbal precision, never stops being funny.