Written by: Janis Hirsch

Directed by: Pamela Fryman

Original US airdate: 21st January 1999

Original UK airdate: 26th March 1999

• A.K.A The Last Onion Out Of Pompeii

• Roughing The Passer

The Mamas and the Papas, Sep 29, 2011

Reviewer: David Sim from Skelmersdale, Lancashire

The opening scene made me realise how much this season was missing by diverting the show away from KACL. Frasier's life shouldn't just be about family. It needs him in the workplace to balance out the equation. And this scene is something that wouldn't have looked out of place in one of the earlier seasons.

One of Frasier's callers challenges him to answer a football question. And Roz comes to his rescue by miming the answer! Its the highlight of the episode.

The fact that the best scene comes at the beginning leaves the rest of the episode on shaky ground. Because although its great to see Frasier and Roz back at KACL, Season 6 is still not quite hitting its stride. Our Parents, Ourselves aspires to greatness, but it falls into the company of other Frasier also-rans like The Seal Who Came To Dinner and Merry Christmas, Mrs Moskowitz.

This episode is special because it marks the one and only time we meet Roz's mother, Joanna Doyle. Roz and Joanna have a bit of a strained relationship, not unlike Frasier and Martin when they first moved in together. While visiting from Wisconsin, Frasier and Roz decide to set Joanna and Martin up on a date at McGinty's.

The scene at McGinty's offers up another highlight that has nothing to do with the main plot. When sideswipes are funnier than the storyline, you know an episode is missing something. Niles is still stuck living at the Shangri-La, and a few of the boys drop into McGinty's. They have a nickname for Niles, The Coyote. And he gets it through The Six Degrees of Separation:

"From Niles, to Nilesy, to Nile E, to Nile E. Coyote, and now just The Coyote. I can't wait to see what's next." (Coyote Ugly?)

Since Martin is a retired cop and Joanna is the Attorney General of Wisconsin, you'd think they'd hit it off. But it turns into the dullest night of Martin's life. But Joanna had the greatest night of her life, and its brought her and Roz closer together. It sets up a tangled web. Roz is eager to keep Joanna and Martin together, while he can't stand the sight of her, and Frasier has to find some way of breaking it to Roz without hurting her or her mother.

Our Parents, Ourselves has all the elements of a great episode. But it falls down in the hands of the scriptwriter, Janis Hirsch. She didn't exactly make an auspicious debut with Roz, A Loan, and she hasn't improved a great deal with this one either. It may just be down to inexperience, but Hirsch lacks an aptitude for farce.

She lays the seeds for a pleasing scenario. To make things more complicated, Martin has invited Bonnie, a waitress from McGinty's he's interested in, over for the Superbowl. And then has to pretend she's going out with Niles so as not to upset Joanna, who's dropped in as well.

I'm not sure why I didn't find this funnier. When you think about it, its not much different from the sublime state of affairs of The Two Mrs Cranes, or the spiralling farce of The Matchmaker. But it pales in comparison. The tangled web of complexities fail to ignite. In the hands of say David Lloyd or Rob Greenberg, I probably would have been rolling on the floor, cracking up at the insanity. But in Janis Hirsch's hands, it never hits critical mass.

She even resorts to a corny old device that you'd think a show of Frasier's calibre would never stoop to. Joanna overhears on Alice's baby monitor Martin and Bonnie explaining to each other what's really going on. One has the sneaking suspicion that the only reason Alice was in the episode was so they could do that. (Even though Alice doesn't appear)

Hirsch hasn't learnt from any of her mistakes with Roz, A Loan. She even includes a similar scene between Frasier and Roz at the end that never raises a single laugh. I'm afraid Janis Hirsch was not cut out to be one of the writers. Something the producers seemed to realise since Hirsch only got one more writing assignment subsequent to this.

Season 6 is obviously still experiencing some fallout from Frasier's misshapen out of work storyline. We'd have to wait for Donny to appear in the latter half of the season for things to pick up properly, and give it the drive that's been missing from it so far. Not resort to pallid rehashes of far better episodes.

Rating: 54%