Frasier – First Class

By: Atiya Irvin-Mitchell

The episode opens with a tense conversation between Eve (Jess Salgueiro) and Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott)…or so it seems. We see Eve saying she needs Freddy and Freddy claiming not to believe her. Now Eve threatens to leave and says they can start a movement. Eve is an actress and auditioning for a play. Freddy says he’s unconvinced, but Eve says he might not be the best judge of good acting. Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) just wants their help picking out a first-day-of-teaching outfit. Freddy needles Frasier about being unable to stop mentioning that he’ll be teaching at Harvard. Frasier teases Freddy for dropping out of Harvard and David (Anders Keith) confuses everyone by showing up because he wants to take his uncle under his wing during his first week of teaching.

At Harvard Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) is really happy to welcome Frasier to the staff officially with a cappuccino and a replica of the thinking cap he used to use on his talk show. Frasier doesn’t want to use the cap in his History of Psychology class, but when it’s time for class the students seem to think it’ll be the extension of his talk show. Students have their mothers calling in for advice or want advice about their own relationships. Or, as David points out, some of them are Googling his net worth and height. Frasier gets fed up and says this class will have nothing to do with his old show or his public life and anyone who isn’t interested in psychology should leave. A lot of people decide to leave the class.

Later, when he’s recounting the story to Corny (Nicholas Lyndhurst) at the bar, Frasier feels like he failed. He wanted his students to take him seriously as a professor. Corny advises him to do what he did and just stop caring. Then, Olivia shows up and mentions that a lot of students who’d originally signed up for Frasier’s class have transferred to Corny’s class. This annoys him because he prefers to do as little actual teaching as possible so he tells Frasier to get it together. Olivia just doesn’t get what went wrong. Frasier’s a natural showman, so why didn’t his students respond to him? Frasier says he doesn’t want to perform anymore he just wants to teach. However, Olivia says the students of today need a little entertainment with their lessons. She suggests that Corny help him out during his first week on the job.

As Corny and Frasier talk in his office Corny wonders why Frasier is so opposed to teaching like a talk show host. The show was aired for fifteen years, so it must’ve done some good. Frasier isn’t so sure. He watchess a few clips of the show and in the beginning he was helping parents reconcile with their estranged kids but by the end he was doing interviews with pigs. Frasier quit because he felt his show devolved into meaningless fluff. He doesn’t want that to be his legacy. So, Corny says if he doesn’t want to go the showman route he’s going to have to win the students over with substance.

When the second class draws near Oliva and Frasier have another talk where it becomes clear she still wants him to be a talk show host. So much so that she makes his classroom look like his old talk show set. He freaks out and leaves upset that she wants him to be a dancing bear. Olivia says she hired him to be a dancing bear because that’s what the students would pay attention to. She points out that although Frasier is famous, he hasn’t published any academic papers or spent years teaching. Long story short, Olivia needs Frasier to stay and succeed because her sister made Provost at Yale. She asks Frasier if he has any idea what it’s like to have a sibling you have an intensely competitive relationship with. He does know on account of his own brother Niles.

At the apartment Eve and Freddy keep rehearsing for her audition but Freddy thinks she’s not seeming beaten down and hopeless enough. Therefore, he suggests she just imitate his father, who seems to be both. Next, David comes over and is outraged on his uncle’s behalf. Frasier explains that he feels like things aren’t working out at Harvard. Freddy finds this ironic and repeats verbatim what Frasier said to him when he dropped out. Although, Frasier says this is completely different and he says he’s not quitting – he just needs to find a way to get his students to take him seriously. So, he comes up with a plan, maybe if they see a classmate taking Frasier seriously it’ll rub off on them.  But who will the engaged student be?

The next day Frasier has recruited Eve to be his ringer. She’s wearing a turtleneck and glasses and posing as a student who wants Frasier to answer questions about  Hermann Ebbinghaus (a German psychologist). But, Frasier never gets to answer her because David gets upset. He thought he’d get to be Frasier’s ringer in the and feels replaced. He gets very emotional and accuses Eve of taking advantage of Frasier and trying to steal his uncle. They go back and forth and David blurts out that Frasier pays for Eve’s apartment with her baby. Out of context that statement can paint a scandalous picture, so Frasier says that’s enough. Then he puts on the thinking cap he rejected before and tells everyone to put on their thinking caps (his show catchphrase).

Later, Frasier is talking to Corny about how the rest of the class went. He had to do the talk show host thing for a while, but then he got the students to listen to a twenty minute lecture on Hermann Ebbinghaus. He’s feeling bummed about not being able to escape his talk show persona, but Corny says he should be grateful he got a group of eighteen-year-olds to listen to him talk about Ebbinghause. Then, Olivia comes in and congratulates him and says he shouldn’t be so embarrassed about his show, it had a positive impact on a lot of people herself included. She says she even ran a fan club. That touches Frasier and he leaves feeling triumph. When he’s gone though, Corny and Olivia talk about her embellishment: She never ran the fanclub.