Why 'Frasier' Never Cast Maris

Niles (David Hyde Pierce) receives a message from Maris

In our recent oral history of the “The Ski Lodge,” Frasier’s classic Season 5 bedroom farce, there was one great joke we didn’t address: As the episode begins, Niles (David Hyde Pierce) informs everyone that his current divorce lawyer is no match for Maris’s team: “When we were courting, I sent Maris a Valentine that said, ‘You’re the girl my heart adores, everything I have is yours.’ Now they’re calling it a prenup.”

Related: The All-Timers: An Oral History of the Classic ‘Ski Lodge’ Episode of 'Frasier

As Frasier fans know, the role of Maris was never cast. That wasn’t what co-creators David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee originally intended. “When David, Peter, and I were writing the pilot, we thought, ‘Let’s pull a fast one on the audience and make them think that we’re going to do a thing like Norm’s wife, Vera, in Cheers, where he talk about her but you never see her. Let’s do that for a few episodes, and then surprise — we’re actually going to see her, so we weren’t ripping off that Cheers thing after all,’” Lee tells Yahoo TV.

In the series premiere, the Crane Brothers discuss whether Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) likes his sister-in-law. “I like her from a distance, you know, the way you like the sun,” Frasier tells Niles. “Maris is like the sun. Except without the warmth.”

Valerie Mahaffey (Hyde Pierce’s pick), Eleanor Bron (Jane Leeves’ pick)

Hyde Pierce allowed himself to imagine who could Maris: “I had done a show with Valerie Mahaffey [the short-lived NBC comedy The Powers That Be], and she is a wonderful, beautiful, terrific actress who in many ways, physically, might have been right,” he says. Co-star Jane Leeves, meanwhile, always pictured the British actress Eleanor Bron (Women in Love) in her mind. “There was something so wrong about her,” she says. “But hilarious.”