I’ve repeated the Friends script analysis from the previous post for another long-running US sitcom, Frasier, taking advantage of the beautifully formatted scripts covering every episode at kacl780.net. As part of the exercise I’m trying out the knitr /RMarkdown method for generating HTML posts directly from analysis scripts. Before starting the Frasier data analysis I had two general thoughts:

Frasier was remarkably consistent in quality across its 11 seasons, with only a slight decline in the latter half of the run. It was much more intelligently written than Friends (excepting Friends’s first two seasons).

My hope was that these would be borne out by analysis of the scripts.

Line share

The consistency is reflected in the share of lines among the main characters over time, which shows little change from start to finish. In contrast to the equal spread among the six leads in Friends, unsurprisingly Frasier, as the titular character, dominated the show, and had a third of the total lines spoken as well as more than twice the number of any of the other characters. That being said, in 14% of the episodes the most lines were spoken by one of the other leads.

Character relationships

The scene-sharing graphic shows the natural separation that existed between scenes at home, often featuring the three Cranes and Daphne, and scenes at work, which were often Roz’s only appearances, thereby leaving her little time to share the screen with lead characters other than Frasier. The characters most commonly seen together were Frasier and Niles. Frasier appeared in about 90% of all scenes.

Character balance

The fractions of lines taken up by the main five and by recurring characters are comparable to the first few seasons of Friends. This could be a coincidence but seems to fit with my theory that having the leads responsible for no more than 80% of the total lines is, for some reason, a good thing, as this is the case consistently for the first 7 seasons of Frasier. There was always a regular supply of lines for one-off characters, many of whom were callers to the radio show. Surprisingly, the contribution of the leads falls off even further over the last 4 years, as recurring characters become more important.

The recurring character with the most lines is Bulldog, who appeared in 53 episodes spread across the whole run. Lilith, Kenny and Bebe were the next most regularly seen characters.

Dialogue content

And now onto the contents of those lines. One of the obvious differences between Frasier and Friends is that Frasier was a much more overtly intellectual show, though often in an ironic way, where the humour was derived from the differences between the pompous and cerebral chat of Frasier and Niles, and the more down-to-earth manner of the other main characters. This dialogue style can be seen somewhat in the average number of letters per word used by each of the characters, where Niles stands out as using more long words. Frasier comes in second in this ranking. Martin in particular speaks with notably shorter words (“Ah” and “jeez” come to mind in particular) than the two brothers.

Character Average word length Niles 4.14 Frasier 4.07 Roz 3.99 Daphne 3.99 Martin 3.96

For comparison, the six leads in Friends all fell within the range 3.80-3.92, so the numbers here do suggest more verbose writing overall.

Another measure of the quality of the writing is the number of unique words used as a percentage of the total words. This figure is fairly constant over the 11 seasons, and at 9-10% it is notably higher than the 7-9% seen for Friends. This reveals the larger vocabularies of the characters of Frasier and, by extension (perhaps), of the show’s writers.

There are at least a couple of other big sitcoms with complete scripts available, so I plan to add those and make some visualisations to properly compare and contrast the various shows.