Written by: Gayle Abrams

Directed by: Kelsey Grammer

Original US airdate: 5th March 2002

Original UK airdate: 19th April 2002

• Bachelorette No.2

Looking for dates in all the wrong places, Jun 16, 2011

Reviewer: David Sim from Skelmersdale, Lancashire

After the enjoyable double act of The Proposal and Wheels of Fortune, Season 9 makes it a hat-trick with Three Blind Dates(Three good episodes in a row! Count em!). Frasier's disastrous romantic life is something we haven't seen a lot of this season. That may explain why this episode compensates by showing us not one but several romantic interests.

Three Blind Dates seems to have borrowed an idea or two (or three) from the Season 6 episode Three Valentines, where it adopts an episodic structure as a framing device and shows us a trio of dates. Although highly praised, I felt Three Valentines was somewhat overrated. It made the woeful misjudgement of showing us the funniest one first, and left the episode with no legs to stand on.

Although it suffers from some of the same drawbacks, I thought Three Blind Dates was a rather more successful spin on the same idea. I felt the laughs dropped off a little at the end, but for the most part its a pleasingly energetic episode.

Since Frasier can't seem to find a woman on his own, Martin, Niles, Daphne and Roz decide to step in and set him up on individual blind dates. The first is Lisa, a woman who owns a bookstore and shares many common interests with Frasier. But she also happens to be a former patient of Niles', which makes it an ethical minefield for him. To get around that, Niles decides to take Frasier to the bookstore, where he can engineer a chance encounter.

What follows is a well directed sequence where Niles is trying to introduce Frasier to Lisa without her actually seeing him. But everytime it looks like Frasier and Lisa are about to cross paths, they seem to miss each other by seconds. That must have been difficult for Kelsey Grammer to act out a scene of visual comedy while directing it at the same time, but its perfectly seamless, and its even funnier watching Niles try the difficult juggling act of avoiding Lisa while trying to get close enough to her so she can meet Frasier.

The second date is even better. Roz brings Susanna, a friend of hers to Frasier's apartment. Again, she shares many common interests with Frasier, particularly the arts. And they seem to hit it off right away. But then things go horribly wrong when Frasier reads her art portfolio and compares her work to an artist she despises. After that, things go downhill and that's the end of another date.

What lifts this segment is the terrific Allison Janney, giving an appeallingly mercurial performance as Susanna. She's helped no end by Gayle Abram's peppery script. The caustic one-liners volley between Frasier and Susanna like a tennis match. The scene is a near-perfect delight. I say near-perfect because its spoiled slightly by Roz's embarrassing attempts to impress Frasier to Susanna. Happily, once Peri Gilpin leaves the scene the jokes just flow like tap-water after that.

After such an entertaining beginning and an even better middle-section, I was hoping Three Blind Dates would carry itself right to the finish line with a pleasingly strong grand finale. Unfortunately, it falls into the exact same trap Three Valentines did. It shows the funniest segments first and limps home with a pallid third act.

Martin sets Frasier up with Kris, a legal secretary planning to go to law school. After such witty byplay and visual comedy, this third date couldn't be more different. As well as the fact that the age-difference between Frasier and Kris kills any plausibilty the scenario might have had, its all just so deathly dull. The two go to a bar, where Kris seems to be a friend to all man. She spends her time shooting pool with just about every fella at the bar while poor Frasier watches forlornly from the sidelines.

And that's it. There isn't anything more to the scene beyond that. Its as if Gayle Abrams exhausted herself with the other two dates, that she couldn't be bothered thinking up anything for a third. It does end on a bit of an irony though when Frasier gets a date (Lisa as it turns out) without help from anyone. He meets her in a laundromat next door to the bar, where she needs help getting spray paint out of her coat (Susanna as it turns out) when she attended an art exhibit. Its a nice case of all three dates converging on one another.

As long as you can excuse a dispiriting third act, Three Blind Dates is still three quarters of a good episode. It has much to recommend, laughs aplenty, and Kelsey Grammer's direction keeps things moving at a sprightly pace. What more could anyone want? (To skip the next episode altogether perhaps?)

Rating: 75%