Frasier has left the building

Frasier’s days were numbered. Though the cast of NBC’s 11- year-old series had known since last fall that this year would be the last, the end came none too easily. During a week in March, TV GUIDE was on set as the show and one of the longest running characters in TV history came to an end.

FIVE DAYS TO GO
NOON The conference room upstairs from the Frasier stage feels like Mom and Dad’s house on the day their oldest child graduates from high school. Everybody’s all smiles, but you can sense the sadness just below the surface.

The cast has gathered with several guest stars, executives, writers and staffers to read through the 264th and final script of a series that has won 31 Emmys. Four boxes of tissues sit on a large table. As sniffled echo the room, Kelsey Grammer haltingly reads the final lines of the script.  With tears in his eyes,  David Hyde Pierce gives Grammer’s arm a reassuring rub.

“That goodbye scene was hard,” admits Grammer, who is bidding farewell to a char- acter he’s played since joining Cheers in 1984. “We’re not supposed to cry when we perform it, so the audience can cry instead. We can only hope.”

FOUR DAYS TO GO
11:30 AM Rehearsal begins. Jane Leeves lets herself into Frasier’s living room and delivers her lines. Hyde Pierce looks concerned. Melancholy about the show’s end? Problems with his dialogue?

Nope. He just doesn’t understand how his TV wife can barge into his TV brother’s apartment when he had to ring the bell. “We’ve established that I have a key.” Leeves explains. Hyde Pierce sighs in mock frustration. “I don’t have one. She does.”

1:02 PM One of the stars brings a personal  problem to the set. “Oh, Eddie!” gasps Leeves, waving a hand in front of her face. Leeves has been lying on the bed in Frasier’s room, lounging with Enzo, the Jack Russell terrier who plays Eddie. Director and series cocreator David Lee asks her and the pup to move center stage. As the cast runs through lines, no one notices Enzo leaving his own artistic state- ment on the floor.
Explains John Mahoney: “Everyone’s a critic. I guess he didn’t like the scene.”

THREE DAYS TO GO
2:05 PM Grammer strides into Frasier’s living room. It’s time for a decision: what to steal.

“I might take this right there,” he muses, picking up a coffee-table book filled with Caspar David Friedrich paintings. He thumbs through it, marveling at the bleak landscapes. “Stuff like this just buries me. Nobody will beat me to this book.”

2:59 PM Grammer and Hyde Pierce struggle to get through their dialogue for the final scene, but it’s no use. They start to tear up, and everybody-the cast, the crew, the security guy-hushes as if this was the 18th hole of the Masters. “I don’t know how we’re going to get through it on the last night,” Mahoney says.

TWO DAYS TO GO
2:40 PM Put this in the “Better late than never” file. While Harriet Sansom Harris, as Frasier’s agent, Bebe, prepares to rehearse, she asks how old her character might be. Laughing, Lee asks her, “You know this is the last episode, right?”

3:10 PM Another crack at the final scene. Peri Gilpin delivers a line to Grammer but fumbles so badly she needs three tries. He is supposed to give her a hug and deliver his next line. Grammer seems to have forgotten the latter. Finally, he lets Gilpin go and begins to read his last bit of dialogue, from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” that he personally selected for the occasion. A couple of lines into it, however, he stops. Speaking softly, Grammer tells Lee, “I’m getting there.”

ONE DAY TO GO
11:55 AM Leeves’ husband, Paramount executive Marshall Coben, takes her picture off stage. Hyde Pierce wanders over and embraces them.

TV ensembles in their final days routinely talk about “being like family.” Such mush is usually as believable as a Bachelor contestant claiming “I’ll love you forever.” But there’s something different with Frasier. The cast truly seems as grateful for one another as for the long run they’ve enjoyed.

“I have a husband and two children because of this show,” says Leeves, who met Coben at a Frasier Christmas party. “Frasier literally changed my whole life. I became who I am here.”

THE FINAL DAY
12:52 PM Apparently, Mother Nature is a Frasier fan. The sunny Southern California weather has turned cold and gray.

Things are equally cloudy inside. The final rehearsal is still a struggle. Leeves avoids eye contact with her costars. Hyde Pierce’s nose is Rudolph-red-a sign of impending tears, says Mahoney. And Grammer, wearing a black T-shirt with FRASIER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING On the back, still can’t make it through Tennyson.

9:54 PM The end has come. And something is missing-tears. Sure, there’s emotion in the final scene- Gilpin’s voice cracking on her last line, moisture around Mahoney’s eyes, Hyde Pierce’s beaming proboscis-but the feared emotional breakdown never materializes.

Grammer finishes the poem with the lines “And tho’/We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.”

He then hugs everyone. The mood is more baby shower than wake, which makes sense. Because this isn’t the end after all.

ONE WEEK LATER
11 PM The cast took the cliché about “fading into the sunset” literally. They bought a Hawaiian vacation for themselves, their crew and the crew’s families. A stunning pink sunset has faded to black over a beautiful beach. Frasier crew members and family moved Grammer and Co. to tears by wearing T-shirts with the ensembles picture, along with the words “THE BEST CAST IN HISTORY.”

“We’ve been going from milestone to mile- stone all year,” sighs a weary Gilpin. “The last Christmas show, the last time we sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Kelsey. Finally we knew we could let it all out. There was not a dry eye on that hillside tonight. But we won’t say goodbye. We’ll see each other again.”