I watched Frasier when I was younger, but I never gave Maris much thought. That is probably because the show itself suggests that Maris does not deserve much thought. She is not a character so much as she is a collection of punch lines: about her appearance (she is, Frasier’s characters imply, excessively skinny), about her class (she is excessively wealthy), and about not much more than that. She is the show’s proof that it is in fact entirely possible to be too rich and too thin.

Watching Frasier now, though—as an adult, in 2019—I keep finding myself thinking about Maris. I keep thinking about how uncomfortably her character sits within the show’s velveteen warmth. Sitcoms are constrained universes, small in their scope and narrow in their sympathies; that is their promise, and also their problem. Frasier embraced its brevity, and that helped to give the show its bubbly and bath-y quality: the same people, basically, rearranged on the same board, episode after episode. The show ran on the fuel of familiarity. It filtered out the world beyond its fictional borders. It was, in today’s terms, a curated collection.

But sitcoms are also products of their times, whether they self-consciously accept that fact or not. Frasier premiered on NBC in 1993, soon after Seinfeld and a little before Friends—and right in the middle of a time of particularly lurching transition in American culture. The show made its debut just after Bill Clinton won the presidency in part because of the rebuke he claimed to offer to the greed-is-good excesses of Reaganism. It arrived amid intense cultural and political backlash to the women’s movement.

Maris, in many ways, functions as Frasier’s acknowledgment of that context. You could read her as a running joke—as a low-stakes gag in a show that was full of them. You could read her, too, as evidence that Frasier’s defining kindness had a mean streak. But you could also read her as an argument: that Frasier, a show that delights in the antics of rich people, also understood that wealth had its dark side. She is a human caveat. The show takes for granted that Frasier and Niles, who collect pomposities as readily as they collect French wines, deserve to be teased for their affectations. But Frasier mocks Maris. It treats her, as the show’s seasons go on, as something of a monstrosity. Watch enough episodes, and her absence begins to look less like a gag and more like a trick: a way for the show to make jokes that could not be directed at an embodied woman.

Maris was not meant to be missing, originally. Not permanently, anyway. She was at first going to be absent only for the first few episodes of the show—a winking callback to Vera on Cheers, and a playful recognition of the fact that Frasier had begun its life as a spin-off. David Lee, one of Frasier’s co-creators, explained the thinking like this: “Let’s do that for a few episodes, and then surprise—we’re actually going to see her, so we weren’t ripping off that Cheers thing after all.”