Early in his relationship with his wife, Ann, Alex Null had a system. When the two spent the night at his place, they’d curl up in bed and fall asleep to an old episode of The West Wing, a favorite of Null’s. When they ended up at Ann’s, however, things were different. She would boot up reruns of Frasier, which she’d fallen in love with in college.
Cut to the present, when the two share a home in Cleveland: Every night, without fail, it’s Frasier that they fall asleep to. “Since we’ve gotten married, I’ve accepted that it’s Frasier that we use to sleep,” says Null, an insurance defense attorney. “‘Happy wife, happy life’ and all that nonsense, I guess.”
The Nulls are far from alone. Falling asleep to Frasier is a habit shared by many—so many, in fact, that the pastime boasts its own subreddit, r/Frasier_Sleepers, with more than 4,200 members dedicated to snoozing through the NBC sitcom, whose 11-season run concluded in 2004. Kate Moss has admitted to the practice, as have Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino and filmmaker Kevin Smith, who hosted a Frasier podcast. Lili Loofbourow, now The Washington Post’s television critic, wrote a 2017 column titled “Why Frasier Is the Best Show to Sleep To,” citing the series’ jazzy credits, smooth banter, and low-stakes drama. “Frasier and Niles spar in a limpid, well-off pool,” Loofbourow wrote of the perpetually bickering Crane brothers. “Their neuroses are gentle and plush.”
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From time to time, Frasier Sleepers surface anew, at which point their slumberers in arms swiftly emerge. “Does anyone else fall asleep to Frasier?” a Redditor wondered in 2017, only to be met with a sea of support. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and fumble around for the controller, so that I can tell Netflix to keep on playing,” a user replied. “Just like the sound of a babbling brook surging through your condo,” added another.
“I thought I was alone,” wrote a third. “I have found my people.”
This week, Frasier fans have been treated to the first new Frasier episodes in nearly 20 years, with the arrival of a reboot on Paramount+. The show is anchored by Kelsey Grammer as the eponymous psychiatrist and radio host, and it remains to be seen whether the reboot will carry the same magic that turned the original series into the favorite lullaby of so many people. For the Frasier Sleepers community, of course, there’s only one way to be sure: They’ll sleep on it.
Null, for his part, has embraced the Frasier lifestyle. Recently, he and his wife welcomed a daughter, who arrived early and spent a few months in the neonatal intensive care unit. Now home, she sleeps best with sound in the background.
The Nulls knew just what to do. “We of course have been using Frasier to provide that,” Null says. “We’ve just been leaving it on nonstop at night and cruising through seasons. ... It will stay on through our daughter’s late-night feeds and everything.”
Not everyone who watches Frasier reruns is doing so in the explicit hope of losing consciousness, of course. As with many older shows hoovered up by streaming platforms, audiences both new and old have rejoiced in the ability to binge to their hearts’ content.
It’s just that sometimes those audiences are very sleepy. Lists of sleep-viewing suggestions abound, with recommendations that generally fall into two camps: network series with vast back catalogs (The Office, New Girl, Suits) or programs heavy on ambient noises, whether it’s cooking, nature, or British accents (Barefoot Contessa, The Great British Baking Show, all things BritBox). Frasier, oddly, might check both boxes.
“I think it’s the sound,” says Craig Goldstein, the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, who adds that he routinely finds himself tuning in at 2:30 a.m. “There was a scene in Café Nervosa”—the Frasier gang’s go-to hangout—“last night with Frasier and Niles, and you can hear the creaking of the wooden chairs and floor. The audio quality allows you to hear so many things and really sets the ambience, and to hear the things you’re hearing, it naturally has to be less chaotic or overproduced or whitewashed, I think, than a lot of other shows.”
Indeed, so rarely does Frasier depart from a soothing sound palette that the Frasier Sleepers community has condemned the Season 2 episode “The Matchmaker” as the single worst episode for sleeping through because it has the nerve to feature a smoke alarm. “For as well as Frasier does farce, and for as well as Kelsey Grammer screams, it’s a gentle, silly show that basically fluffs the pillow and lays your head gently upon it, allowing you to drift off serenely,” Goldstein says. “Frasier is like a Lay’s potato chip in exactly one way: It’s nearly impossible to have just one.”
It’s a curiously long tail for a Cheers spinoff. The series wooed many late-night viewers during its years on Netflix, when the platform’s cautious prompt—Are you still watching?—became as much a part of the bingeing experience as the show itself. In 2020, Frasier split from Netflix; these days, it can be found on Hulu, Prime Video, and Paramount+. But many Frasier Sleepers get their kicks the old-fashioned way: on cable. Multiple people credit the Hallmark Channel as the originator of their nocturnal habit. Seven days a week, the network fills the wee hours with reruns: first, six back-to-back episodes of The Golden Girls and then, four episodes of Frasier. (Likely not coincidentally, The Golden Girls has attracted its own fan base devoted to the series’ utility as a sleep aid.)
“Frasier is just so cozy,” says JoLissa Jones, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, who caps her evenings with the complete Hallmark quartet. “Most of the spaces are small and intimate. We spend a lot of time in the booth with him and in Nervosa, the café, even in Frasier’s bathtub. It’s funny, but you don’t have to think too hard or pay too close attention to it to enjoy it.”
While Frasier Sleepers agree on most things—Niles and Daphne’s relationship is television’s romantic zenith; the Roz and Frasier hookup should be purged from the official record and never spoken of again—there’s one point of contention: what order to watch in. While many settle for whatever the Hallmark powers that be queue up or stick to a small stable of favorite episodes—“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz,” “The Ski Lodge,” “Travels With Martin”—some take things more seriously.
Chris Hine, who works as the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Timberwolves beat writer, was nearly at the finish line of an ambitious project when we spoke this week: a complete rewatch of every single one of Frasier’s 264 episodes. Hine began the project six months ago, intending to wrap up in time for the reboot’s premiere on Thursday. When we spoke on Wednesday, he still had seven episodes left to go. “So I will be watching and falling asleep late at night tonight to get through the rest of the seven that I have left,” he joked.
“The biggest issues they have are, you know, does Frasier need to get his jacket relined in time for the opera?” Hine says of the show’s enduring evening appeal—something he finds particularly precious in the midst of an NBA season. “I’ll be on the road somewhere and get back to my hotel, and I’ll fire it up on my laptop or my phone. And I’m just lying in my hotel room bed with a perpetual smile on my face the entire time. If I have a 6 a.m. flight or a really early wake-up call, I’m not really dreading it anymore after I’ve watched an episode or two.”
For its part, the Frasier reboot might just be aware of the Frasier Sleepers community. The second episode begins at the apartment of Frasier’s son, Freddie, which he shares with his roommate, Eve, and her newborn son, John. John, naturally, is crying up a storm, leaving Freddie and Eve in an exhausted fog.
Then, Frasier walks in with coffee, says his hellos, and leaves the room. Baby John falls suddenly silent. A beat passes. Eve’s jaw drops.
“That was incredible,” she gasps. “I think your dad’s voice put John to sleep. Look at him—it’s like he’s been chloroformed!”
Just wait till he can buy a TV of his own.
