I'm not really sure why I like the episode of Frasier that first aired 15 years ago today.
Except that, as always, the writers for the show had a unique take on their theme — which, in this case, was the twin themes of aging and commitment.
Which, I suppose, are really just subsets of the more general topic of life, which is probably more accurately defined by the phrase "it's complicated."
Now, that's real reality programming — even if it is in a fictional context.
The episode — "Kissing Cousin" — centered on a visit from Roz's cousin Jen (played by Zooey Deschanel). Jen was a younger but just as free–spirited version of Roz (Peri Gilpin). In fact, Roz once babysat for Jen and took the opportunity to school her in Roz's rather bohemian ways. The two became close, and Jen, like many disciples of an avant–garde role model, took it to extremes.
Jen was negative about, well, just about everything, but all of it couldn't be explained simply by the mindset Roz had encouraged. Jen had that judgmental certainty of the rightness of every thought she had and every position she took that often seems to be the hallmark of youth.
And older viewers must have suspected that, had they been given the opportunity to watch Jen's character evolve as she got tossed around by life (as all lives inevitably must be), they would have seen her abandon most of her preconceived notions about how life is and should be.
But Jen never made another appearance on Frasier so viewers will never know what became of her. They can only speculate based on their own experiences and knowledge.
Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) put up with it longer than one might think his narcissistic personality could, but he finally had enough when Jen told him that Freud had been "proven wrong about everything." The strongly Freud–influenced Frasier could not resist the urge to set her straight.
Otherwise, Frasier was to be commended for an atypically restrained response that anyone who has had to contend with Millennials must admire.
But he could get some distance from Jen. He wasn't with her 24 hours a day the way Roz was, and Roz, who was 38 in the episode (Gilpin was actually 41 when it aired), couldn't keep up with her twentysomething cousin.
And the all–nighters with the globe–trotting Jen were wearing Roz down.
While Frasier seethed privately over Jen's attitudes, the perennially prissy Niles (David Hyde Pierce) was willing to chalk them off to youthful exuberance, ironically noting that "we were all that way" and "it passes."
To older observers, the young always seem to have everything, and that can be frustrating for those who have lost a step or two.
The truth is that no generation has it all, and Millennials, in spite of their reputation for being technology–savvy, have their own obstacles to overcome. Many are more resistant to rites of passage, like leaving their parents' homes, than their predecessors.
For many this is said to be an economic condition, heavily influenced by the Great Recession and related external factors, but that does little to explain the behavior of older Millennials like Jen, who had been living in places like London and Florence — and planning a trip to Vietnam because "Americans have never even heard of it" — years before the economy imploded.
I'll admit that most Millennials probably couldn't afford to live the way Jen did in 2002 — but her lifestyle seemed to have an appeal for the station manager, Kenny (Tom McGowan). Recently separated from his wife and still working in an office filled with boxes containing his possessions (because Kenny's experience had been that permanent jobs were temporary), Kenny had his issues with commitment. And Jen was free of such bonds.
Jen encouraged him to be more impulsive, but when he did so and then tried to arrange to travel with her to Vietnam, she revealed herself to have her own problems with commitment. She always traveled alone, she told Kenny, because of an experience she once had. The audience was left to guess about the nature of that experience, but one can reasonably imagine that it involved someone who had feelings for Jen that she did not return.
That seems to be at the heart of many such human conflicts.
That person was probably another Millennial, not as mature as Kenny, who handled Jen's rejection quite well, shrugging it off and expressing the hope that they would run into each other in Asia — and, after she left, he began to unpack the boxes in his office.
