Frasier's success hinged on John Mahoney’s painfully real father-son dynamic with Kelsey Grammer

Decider

“Frasier works because Mahoney works,” says Brett White in tribute to the late actor. “While Niles and Frasier serve two-peas-in-a-pod comedy, Martin Crane–a cantankerous and retired police detective with a bad hip and a delightfully dopey dog–is exactly the foil that the fussy and pompous Frasier needed. It’s the kind of foil he never got in his near decade-long run on Cheers, as no one in that bar was his dad. It’s this push and pull, the battle of wills between a full-grown son and his polar opposite dad, that pushed the show from brilliant farce to legit, gut-punching art.” ALSO: Mahoney shunned his fame.