So my wife and I were watching that episode of Frasier today. The plot revolves around Frasier trying desperately to make it to a public rally at the Space Needle. For an episode that is meant to be a love letter to Seattle, it sure has some funny inaccuracies. Frasier gets a fish dropped on his shoe at Pike Place Market. He freaks out because he needs to get new shoes, spends a long time in a shoe store and then has to scramble to get there. He ends up after being mugged and trying to use a pay phone going to the monorail. Funny thing is, the nearest place to Pike Place Market to get decent dress shoes is in the Westlake Shopping Center, which is one terminus of the monorail. If he had just gone there in the first place then he would have been fine. This is, of course, in addition to the glaring error in every episode. Frasier's apartment building could not exist in Seattle. That view of the the Space needle faces no big buildings, it was either taken from Queen Anne's Hill or a helicopter. A 20+ story apartment building on Queen Anne's would be too tall for that view. Kinda funny.
I seem to remember one of the producers admitting that the view was basically a panorama of the Seattle Skyline, but with Space Needle added so that people would immediately recognise where it was meant to be?
Wait a minute - Seattle is a real city?? Since when? Next you're going to tell me that Boston Legal was set in a real city, too....
I think a lot of stuff on Frasier was so blatantly wrong as to be its own brand of in joke. And believe me, I'm not complaining. A lot of it makes me laugh harder when watching the show.
I live in Portland. Seattle is a place where I love to go, though. It's just really funny once you realize it.
True. I love Frasier. I think that it's one of the greatest comedies of all time. It just struck me as odd that since the cast and crew had to go to West Lake to film that they wouldn't have seen the oopsie. Of course, even if they had would have probably been too late to even add in a line of dialogue from Niles like, "Oh, Frasier, can't you just get new shoes at Store X?" and Frasier reply about not being a barbarian.
You're forgetting the biggest inaccuracy about Frasier's Seattle: it's written as if grunge music and Microsoft don't exist. Watching Frasier, you'd think, instead of hippies computer nerds, the city was populated by upper middle class WASPS wearing three piece suits and listening to classical music. Oh, and one lame cop.
Bill Gates was in the 200th episode. He answered questions by callers to Frasier's show about the then new WinXP.
Fraiser's Seattle, going along with the old trope, was also depicted as being quite rainy; it's the only show I can think of where we regularly see it raining outside as just part of the scenery and not part of the plot (usually the only time you'll see it rain in an TV show.) In reality Seattle isn't even in the top 10 of the rainiest cities in the U.S.