We live in an age when beloved celebrities seem to be dropping like flies but this month’s death of the British-born stage and television actor John Mahoney stood out. Not many people can inspire tributes to the ugly old chair they used to sit in – but no one could talk about ugly old chairs the way Mahoney could.
Besides his decades-long career in theatre, Mahoney was best known for his 11-year turn as Martin Crane on Frasier. Mahoney’s “Marty” was the lovably grouchy, salt-of-the-earth father of two pompous, egghead psychiatrist brothers, whose dissimilarities from their dad formed much of the show’s appeal.
John Mahoney was a lovely man. His Martin Crane was FRASIER's moral center; his cranky decency and bewildered love for his two improbable sons was hilarious one minute, heartbreaking the next, and you never caught him acting. It was a privilege and a joy to write for him. pic.twitter.com/Fs7RvNjxOj
— Joe Keenan (@MrJoeKeenan) February 6, 2018
Apart from endless witticisms about opera and the bizarre ailments that plagued the unseen Maris, Frasier at its core was a heartfelt exploration of family: how people struggle to overcome disparities of class, personality and worldview to live out their love for each other. The trio’s fumbling efforts to rebuild a family unit after the death of their matriarch, Hester, gave Frasier an emotional resonance few other sitcoms have achieved.
The best TV father figures garner a love that other fictional archetypes rarely attract, and Marty is one of just a handful of characters to win one of pop culture’s most treasured titles: the Good TV Dad.
But what exactly makes a Good TV Dad? It’s not the success of the show they feature in. The label doesn’t apply to Homer Simpson, a drunken boor who periodically throttles his son. Mad Men’s Don Draper, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano and Breaking Bad’s Walter White were all fathers defined by the ways in which they failed their families.
A Good TV Dad typically presents an image of fatherhood that our culture does not often promote. Millennials have two go-tos: The OC’s Sandy Cohen, played by Peter Gallagher, and Veronica Mars’ Keith Mars, played by Enrico Colantoni. Their circumstances are vastly different but both play with the conventions of the Mike Brady-style “family man” in their own ways.
Sandy, a public defender happily married to an real estate developer, occasionally resents his wife’s role as the family’s main breadwinner. Keith is a gumshoe private eye and a single dad, living job to job to support his precocious teenage daughter and trying to cope with being professionally disgraced and abandoned by his wife.
It’s in the examples they set for their children – as nurturer, advocate, confidant and role model – that they resemble one another. Besides being a thoughtful and caring father to Seth, Sandy also proves to be a vital source of support and stability for Ryan, the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kid he adopts after bailing him out of jail. Keith beats criminals up for a living and saves Veronica’s life, but his real value to his daughter lies in his unflagging moral and emotional support as she navigates the traumas of loss, sexual assault and parental divorce.
Coach Eric Taylor of Friday Night Lights has also joined the Good Dad pantheon. Friday Night Lights was a show about family and fatherhood disguised as a show about football. Besides his mutually respectful partnership with his wife, Tami, and his halting, heartfelt love for his teenage daughter, Julie, “Coach” acts as a surrogate dad to an entire team of hormone-riddled teenage boys, many with dysfunctional home lives, private demons or debilitating injuries.
His mantra, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose,” could reduce him to a one-dimensional grunt but the time and concern Coach invests in his young charges’ private lives sets him apart. Forced to have “the talk” with one of his players, he keeps it short but gives advice every young man should have drummed into them: “Women are to be respected.”
King of the Hill’s Hank Hill, that seller of propane and propane accessories, echoes Martin Crane as a father whose love for his family trumps his own bewilderment at where fatherhood has taken him. Hank is continually baffled by his son, Bobby – a strange, whimsical boy who rarely lives up to Hank’s old-school ideas of what a young all-American man should be.
While Hank’s macho bluster is frequently challenged by Peggy, his formidable wife, his perseverance with Bobby is fuelled by a quiet determination not to turn out like his father, Cotton – a philandering, misogynist bigot who delighted in belittling and humiliating his son. Despite his stilted attempts at affection, slightly retrograde views and his exasperated insistence that “that boy ain’t right”, Hank Hill is undoubtedly a Good TV Dad.
Sadly, the strongest example of how profoundly a Good TV Dad can affect us is not a pleasant one. For decades, Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, The Cosby Show’s goofy, sweater-wearing patriarch, was “America’s dad” – a paragon of fatherly virtue and right living. So as allegations of sexual assault piled up against the star, the sense of betrayal and loss many people felt was compounded by the impact Huxtable had had on their lives – it was as though a trusted family member had let them down.
In the popular imagination, Cosby was Huxtable, to the extent that some people could not imagine “Cliff Huxtable would do something like that”.
To find someone worthy of the loyalty he won through his on-screen persona, we can turn back to Mahoney, who acted as a father surrogate to Frasier’s other leads to the point where they formed real-life familial bonds. Peri Gilpin, who played Roz, remembered Mahoney singing at her wedding. Along with David Hyde Pierce, who played Martin’s irrepressibly prissy younger son Niles, Mahoney was godfather to the child of Jane Leeves, who portrayed Daphne Moon.
Kelsey Grammer, Frasier’s star, has long been open about how Mahoney in some ways replaced his biological father, who died when Grammer was a child. On Twitter, he posted a short tribute that said much in its simplicity: “He was my father. I loved him.”
