An Ode To Mr Chump: Donny Douglas and the Mediocre Filler Love Interest
Sam and Diane. Ross and Rachel. Tim and Dawn. Smithy and Nessa. Yellow M&M and Red M&M. All iconic, tempestuous and frequently violent lovers (especially in the latter’s case, in my extremely NSFW fanfic) — and all adherents to the Golden Rule of Love in Sitcoms: “any characters set up as potential love interests in the first episode will be together by the series finale”.
Love in sitcoms is both surprisingly banal and terrifyingly inevitable, a form of eery black magic that seems to be powered by the echoing laughter of studio audiences or sardonic looks to camera. Two characters catch sight of each other within the first ten minutes of a pilot and BAM — they are bonded, cosmically imprinted on one another, fated to fight, flirt, kiss, break up, make up and marry over the course of the next three to nine seasons (or twelve episodes if you’re in the UK).
This unstoppable love takes many forms — the all-encompassing and suffocating nature of Ross and Rachel’s “will-they won’t-they” relationship around Season 3 of Friends, where the entire show was fuelled by drama around this extremely toxic pair, and every other character existed just to say “did you hear, Ross cheated on Rachel!”; to the “oops we were having so much fun as workmates that we accidentally had sex and got married” relationships of Jake and Amy in Brooklyn 99 and Jonah and (different) Amy in Superstore; to the “have to pretend to be a couple to make sure one of us doesn’t get sent to Hell but actually we’re soulmates and our love will literally save the universe” relationship of Chidi and Eleanor in The Good Place — which is a hell of a lot of stress to put on a budding romance, but still.
In order for this love to be earned, however, there must be challenges thrown in the way of our predestined lovers for them to overcome. These can be interdimensional demons hellbent on torturing them for eternity, but usually they take the form of something more odious and hated — the Mediocre Filler Love Interest.
Short of playing Kevin James’ wife in one of those “Kevin James Hates His Wife” shows, the Mediocre Filler Love Interest is the most thankless role in all sitcom. These guys are The Worst — modern-day sirens, if sirens could take the form of Helen Baxendale or Kal Penn, whose only function is to tempt one of our heroes away, to dash their Happily Ever After on the rocks of an inferior relationship. Their existence is to be a photographic negative of the character they are usurping in the relationship — if they’re replacing Ross in Friends, they will be cool, suave, exciting and Italian (IE, Paolo, a character so two-dimensional they probably just slid him under the couch after Season 3). If they’re replacing Nessa in Gavin and Stacey, they will be predictable, logical, boring and judgemental (IE, Sonia from the 2019 Christmas special, someone written with so few redeeming features that if you search for her on Google she is described as “Smithy’s hated girlfriend”).
They are painted with big, broad strokes — and why not? They aren’t real characters as such — they’re inciting incidents made flesh, existing to provoke our heroes into doing something rash. They’re jumping off points for our heroes, who will scowl at them from the sidelines, fuming as the Mediocre Filler Love Interest canoodles with their true love. “What have they got that I don’t have?” our hero will wonder aloud — and then the episode will be about our hero trying to be more macho, or more organised, or more spontaneous, or more Italian. Twenty-two minutes later and the main character has realised that they were better off the way they were before, and that they’ll get their love back by being themselves. Clap clap clap, credits, funny production title card (“Shh not a doctor”/ “Sit Ubu Sit, Good Dog”) and we’re out.
Because really, all our hero has to do to win is to wait for the Mediocre Filler Love Interest to reveal their true selves, the fatal flaw that will put their doomed relationship out of its misery. It may be something innocuous (failing to laugh enough at a joke from one of our heroes that their true love would have found hilarious) or it may be something downright unhinged (Phoebe’s cop boyfriend Gary shooting a bird while they lie in bed one morning springs to mind). No matter what it is, the result is always the same — the Mediocre Filler Love Interest is broken up with and disposed of, forgotten by the rest of the show, as the main cast close ranks once more and commit to never speaking their name again. Having fulfilled their purpose, the Mediocre Filler Love Interest ceases to exist in any meaningful way — to the show, their feelings (be it pain at the break-up, or relief, or just confusion) is irrelevant, save for a quick joke or a callback several seasons later. The character falls by the wayside, their broad strokes melting into the background, as the show trundles on towards its Happily Ever After, never giving the latest overcome obstacle a second thought.
At first glance, Donny Douglas is the archetypal Mediocre Filler Love Interest. He stands in the way of Niles and Daphne, the great love at the centre of Frasier, and in so doing he represents everything that Niles is not — slovenly, practical, hardnosed. He comes into the show in Season 6 as a new obstacle in Niles’ pursuit of Daphne, just at the exact moment that it looks like all previous obstacles had been swept clear by Niles’ generous divorce settlement from Maris (one which, irony of ironies, was only possible thanks to the tenacity of his divorce lawyer… Donny).
In the most basic terms, Donny’s function in the show is that of a Mediocre Filler Love Interest — to jeopardise Niles and Daphne’s inevitable relationship, and to drive Niles to acts of desperation and self-sabotage. Donny’s proposal to Daphne sends Niles spiralling into new, horrifying paths, like trips to Disneyland with a young barista and very unstylish leather jackets, before ultimately settling into the arms of his Mediocre Filler Love Interest, Mel. Donny’s final fate is also very typical of a Mediocre Filler Love Interest — he’s left at the altar following a grand romantic gesture by Niles the night before the wedding, which convinces Daphne that he’s her true love. From this perspective, Donny is just another in a long line of jilted sitcom lovers, whose doomed relationship comes to an end in the most painful way possible (see also Barry in Friends, Emily in Friends, Dave Coaches in Gavin and Stacey, Lou Morris in Friday Night Dinner, Shivrang in New Girl*... the list goes on.)
(*Admittedly Shivrang doesn’t quite fit into this category as he’s not heartbroken when Cece breaks up with him, as it means he’s free to admit his love for someone else at the wedding, Elaine (inexplicably played by Taylor Swift). But given that the season and episode follows the exact same beats as the jilted sitcom lover — the True Love interrupting the wedding, the person getting married admitting their love for the True Love, etc — and the Elaine reveal is really a quick joke that subverts the trope more than something genuinely different, I’m still counting it on the list. SUE ME.)
Following sitcom logic, as the man capable of sinking Niles and Daphne, Donny should be at the very least forgettable, but preferably downright unlikeable. He should take Daphne for granted, he should cheat on her constantly, he should promise her a life of bland, passionless sex, if not downright misery. His flaws should be painfully obvious to everyone except Daphne (until the very moment that she leaves him), and they should be so grotesque that Niles looks like a knight in shining armour by comparison. He should be, in short, a Bad Man, driving Daphne towards her inevitable, predestined love.
But he is not. He is a brilliant, charming man, tenacious and wildly successful in his professional life, but caring and loving in his personal one. He cuts down on his caseload to spend more time with Daphne, he takes her on expensive surprise holidays, he even gods so far as to chat with her through the Internet when he’s away on cases (remember, this was the 90s, when to log onto the Internet was to enter a terrifying and confusing domain of nerds and screeching dial-up noises that lasted up to 30 minutes). Donny not only adores Daphne, but takes her friends and family to his heart too — going to a tractor pull with Marty; acting as bartender/matchmaker for Niles when he breaks up with Mel; doting over little Alice, Roz’s young daughter. And as for his attitude to Frasier — he perceives himself forever in his debt for being the one that brought Daphne into his life.
It’s clear that Donny is a genuinely good person — but crucially not to a fault. That, of course, is another type of Mediocre Filler Love Interest — someone who is impossibly, irritatingly perfect (ie, Robbie in New Girl, Sean in Scrubs), whose over-the-top virtues exist just to magnify our hero’s shortcomings. Donny is by no means perfect — he’s unsophisticated (in his first appearance he turns up to a meeting with Niles and Frasier in sweaty gym clothes, and ends up flashing them when he wipes mustard off his cheek with the towel covering his modesty), he’s slapdash with details (accidentally inviting the wrong Moon brother to stay with the family in the run up to the wedding), and he’s boorish in the way that was apparently acceptable in ’90s sitcoms (he wants someone other than Frasier to organise his bachelor party, out of a fear that he won’t hire a rowdy enough stripper — oh, 1999, a simpler, lowkey misogynistic time).
But these are flaws of a well-rounded character rather than a two-dimensional villain. He doesn’t exist to be a funhouse mirror of our hero — he exists in his own right. To develop such an authentic, likeable character within a couple of episodes is a staggering achievement, and it’s down in no small part to the performance of Saul Rubinek, one of the underrated and very best Frasier guest stars. I don’t say that lightly: Frasier has some of the most gifted actors playing its brilliant secondary characters (Daniel Butler as Bulldog, Harriet Sansom Harris as Bebe Glazer, Bebe Neuwirth as Lilith…) But Rubinek’s performance is different — whereas most secondary characters in Frasier have a clearly defined and broad comic perspective (Bulldog is a sexist pig, Bebe is the Devil, Lilith is the ice queen), Donny’s joke isn’t immediately obvious. Rubinek, then, needs to match the silliness of the show, to be at ease with what is frequently a very over-the-top and arch tone, while also being genuinely charming and sweet, to the point that the audience accepts that he is good enough for Daphne (a character we have had six years to fall in love with).
It’s a fine line, but it’s one that Rubinek walks perfectly — capable of playing that scruffy aggressive lawyer one minute and the lovesick fool with Daphne the next, without a hint of contradiction or hypocrisy. At the same time, he sells the big bold studio sitcom jokes with his brilliantly expressive face (those EYEBROWS!), and his performance in the Season 6 episode “Decoys" (where Niles invites him and Roz up to a cabin in the woods in an attempt to get them together without realising Frasier and Martin will be there) proved he could handle that Frasier farce with aplomb.
This brings me on to a wider point. Donny Douglas is not just a perfect fit for Daphne — he is a perfect fit for Frasier as a show. He acts as a bridge between the low status and high status characters — while he sits easily with Daphne, Roz and Martin, possessing their street smarts and practicality, he also has no qualms rubbing shoulders with Frasier and Niles, earning their respect with his professional tenacity. This is, of course, the opposite of what a Mediocre Filler Love Interest should do — it should be painfully, irritatingly obvious that this new person is an interloper in the established line-up of the sitcom. They should disrupt the rhythm of everything and stir up trouble between best pals — you know, a real Emily from Friends, a person whose entire life seemed to revolve around making the lives of six random Americans utterly miserable. Why? Because she’s English, that’s why, and also her mother is Jennifer Saunders and that’s presumably very stressful. But Donny doesn’t do that. He harmonises, to the point that we’re almost willing him to break Niles’ heart.
Perhaps the best example of the show’s respect and care for Donny as a character comes in the scene when he proposes to Daphne. A typical Mediocre Filler Love Interest proposal is bland and careless, and frequently entirely off-screen — The Office (both UK and US) starts with Dawn/Pam already engaged to Lee/Roy, and in the US version we just hear horror stories about how fraught that engagement is (Pam dreams of the perfect wedding but Roy blows the money they were saving on jet skis). More often than not, the engagement is revealed as a moment of pathos at the end of an episode — Rachel smiling through her sadness when she hears about Ross and Emily, Schmidt’s horror at Shivrang hijacking his own party to propose to Cece. The focus is very much on the hero’s heartbreak, with the proposal itself an afterthought.
By contrast, during Donny’s proposal, Frasier gives equal weight to both romantic rivals. It’s a strange episode in some ways before the proposal— Daphne discovers that Donny is about to propose, but then gets a “psychic vision” telling her to reject it, which Niles gleefully and uncharacteristically exploits, urging her to break off the relationship.
(A quick tangent but Daphne’s “psychic visions" past Season 2 always sit a bit uncomfortably with me: they feel like a character trait from a bygone era, when Daphne was just the kooky English help, rather than the rounded character she is by Season 6. While Niles doesn’t exactly embrace that mystical aspect of Daphne, he still tolerates it, even though they’re the type of thing that he would consider a red line in any other relationship — but really all that serves to do is remind the audience that Niles' attraction to Daphne was, at least initially, entirely physical, and that he considers her personality completely secondary. Tangent OVER.)
Anyway, Frasier guilts Niles into eventually doing the right thing — he urges Daphne to ignore his advice and not to break up with Donny off the back of her vision. But Daphne’s mind is made up — she’ll trust the magical forces that guide her and turn Donny down. The upshot is that Donny arrives into the episode unwittingly doomed — stressing about a proposal that the audience knows will end in tears, talking to Martin and Frasier about an upcoming holiday to Alaska with Daphne that they know will surely never happen now.
It allows for some great dramatic irony (when Donny mentions that Alaska is one of the few places that one can feel completely alone, Martin darkly responds, “ah, you like that feeling, huh?”), but it also acts as a microcosm for Donny’s entire existence on the show — we’ve known, deep down, that this moment has been coming. The Golden Rule of Sitcom Love means Niles and Daphne will get together, and therefore that Donny’s time with us must end in heartbreak. That dramatic irony has been a subtext throughout — it’s just made tangible here. He’s had a good run, but Donny is walking to his execution here, and none of us can look away, despite knowing what will happen—Daphne will reject him, he’ll leave in disgrace and misery, and the show will move into the next chapter of Niles and Daphne’s odyssey.
But that is not what happens. Instead, Donny delivers this — a proposal that I love so much that it has to be posted in its entirety (with thanks to kacl780.net):
“You know, I thought that being a divorce attorney would have just soured me on relationships… and then I met you. And I found myself telling my clients to reconcile, because I think that if they could find even just a tiny little bit of the happiness that I’ve found with you they could make it. I’ve been thinking about that time we went to the little bed-and-breakfast in the country and we sat in that porch swing all night. [laughs] When I looked at the sky, you told me your dad and you used to sit on your step and do the same thing when you were a kid. He said that the only man good enough for you would “scoop the stars out of the sky with his hat and lay them at your feet.” Well… [taking ring out] I’ve only caught this one so far. But if you’ll accept it, I’ll spend my life chasing down the rest of them for you.”
I adore every bit of this — from the way that Daphne has changed him from a hardened defence lawyer to someone who believes in love again, to the little insight into their blissful relationship at the bed-and-breakfast, to the gorgeous metaphor of Donny scooping the stars out of the sky, to Rubinek’s nervous little chuckle midway through. “If you’ll accept it, I’ll spend my life chasing down the rest of them for you.” It is, to me, perfectly pitched — as emotionally satisfying as any “happily ever after” sitcom proposal, and reflects the care the writers of Frasier put into every word in the show. Indeed, it is so beautiful that one forgets, even just for a second, that we’re supposed to be rooting for Donny’s ruin.
Daphne accepts, and suddenly the fortunes swing once more — Donny is the happiest man in the world, and Niles is crushed. The audience is left conflicted — we still know that Niles and Daphne will end up together, they must do, but Donny can’t be cast aside any more, a fleeting romance that will mend over time. Not only is he a genuinely good man, but his love for Daphne is painfully real. To break up an engagement like this — heartfelt, authentic, not a slapdash one like Ross and Emily in Friends — will be an act of cruelty. But we know it must be done.
Donny and Daphne’s eventual break-up, over a season later, is unconventional — while it’s triggered by Daphne’s bolt from the altar, we never actually see Donny on his wedding day. This was a decision that was forced on production rather than being a deliberate decision in the writers room. Jane Leeves was pregnant during filming for the beginning of Season 8, meaning there were only a few outfits that she could wear to hide her baby bump — and Daphne’s wedding dress from the end of Season 7 was decidedly not one of them. If they wanted Daphne in her wedding dress, they couldn’t shoot her below the waist — so the decision was made to film her breaking up with Donny at the wedding from Donny’s perspective, meaning the whole scene is a tight pseudo-steady cam on Daphne’s face and no Donny in sight (an extreme and slightly offputting departure from the usual studio sitcom shooting style of Frasier).
While it’s perhaps sad that we missed out on what would have been a brilliant Saul Rubinek performance as Donny the heartbroken groom at the wedding, it does make his next appearance all the more shocking. We next see Donny a couple of days after the aborted wedding, when Frasier goes to see him — and it’s clear that the break-up has destroyed him. Gone is the blissfully happy man, the divorce lawyer who learned to love again — in his place is a bitter, lost soul, sitting in darkness, still wearing the tattered remains of his wedding outfit, cradling the only friend who can understand him. The little plastic groom from the top of the now doomed wedding cake, AKA “Mr Chump”. Daphne and Niles’ love has taken everything from him — his happiness, his professionalism, his sanity (he mentions a bunch of pills that the doctors gave him because he wasn’t “feeling very well yesterday”, an ominous statement) and, perhaps most devastatingly of all, his basic decency. He’s suing Daphne for $100,000 in punitive damages for emotional distress, and goes on to threaten to, in layman’s terms, sue Frasier’s ass off. Here is a new Donny Douglas that we’ve only seen shadows of — a vicious lawyer, devoid of humanity, dedicated to inflicting as much pain as possible.
This is probably Saul Rubinek’s most memorable performance as Donny (the wild deviations between lackadaisical misery and furious outbursts, the sad stares at the wedding topper, the hidden snarl in his voice as he pronounces “Mr Chhhhhump”), and it’s perhaps because the show has stripped the character of all the complexity that he built up over the previous two seasons. When Frasier tells him that this isn’t the Donny Douglas he knows, Donny replies sadly, “I’m a lawyer, it’s my natural impulse” — and that’s all he is now. That’s all he can cling to. A ghost of his former self, fuelled only by resentment and sadness.
This is not the last we see of Donny — five episodes later, in a shock twist, he drops the lawsuits against Frasier and Daphne, all because he claims to have fallen in love with a recently divorced woman named Nancy, with whom he’s now engaged. We can see a little bit of the charming Donny return — he seems happy enough, making little jokes about the fire exit when Niles accidentally sets his napkin on fire in the restaurant. During the course of the episode he even gets married to Nancy in a registry office, a wedding which Daphne accidentally crashes (“call me crazy but I’ve got a prejudice against long engagements,” he quips to her). Daphne and Donny hug, and she’s able to get some closure — she can move on with Niles without that guilt of destroying Donny’s life.
But it’s clear that Donny is destroyed — he’s marrying Nancy not out of love, but out of a desire to wash away the memory of his time with Daphne. We next see Donny in Season 10, at the same registry office for Niles and Daphne’s wedding — he bumps into them with his new fiancée Bridgett because, surprise surprise, Nancy and he have broken up. “I know I was getting married the last time you ran into me, but this time I found the real thing!” he assures Daphne, desperate to tell her he’s moved on. Of course, during Niles and Daphne’s wedding, when he mistakenly thinks that Daphne is breaking up with Niles, he reveals his hand, standing up during the middle of the ceremony and yelling “YES! I knew it! Now YOU know what it’s like to have the love of your life dump you at the altar! And good luck trying to find somebody as good, because she just ain’t out there!” Bridgett leaves in tears, Donny realises what he’s said and hurries after her, never to return to the show.
This is the show’s final, cruellest trick it plays on Donny — it transforms him into merely a Mediocre Filler Love Interest . A one-note character, where the joke is that he just can’t stop marrying women. He will never find the happiness that he deserved in Season 6 and 7. While Daphne can move on with her life, he will be trapped — destined to leap into relationships without thought, to marry as quickly as possible, forever paranoid that his love will leave him again.
Frasier was a deceptively unorthodox show (within the limitations of being a traditional studio sitcom about five wealthy white people). It frequently took big swings — from its multiple references to opera in almost every episode, to its extremely high concept farce episodes, to the very idea of giving Frasier, the snootiest character on TV, an even snootier brother. But I think there’s an argument to say that this, the loving creation and brutal destruction of Donny Douglas, is the biggest swing the show ever took.
At the precise moment that the unstoppable train of Niles and Daphne seemed to be rocketing towards its inevitable conclusion, the show placed a good, innocent man on the tracks. At the precise moment that other shows would unquestioningly celebrate the concept of love (and would earn the right to, after seven years of furtive glances, indescribable pain and missed opportunities), Frasier instead acknowledges that love is destructive. It is cruel. It is unjust. For every happy couple joined together against all odds, there is a jilted lover, sitting in a darkened office, clinging on to Mr Chump. For every heart mended, there is a heart that can never be made whole.
In a sense, it is not surprising that Frasier would show such consideration to the plight of the doomed lover, left at the altar. My list before of Donny’s predecessors was missing the most famous example — Frasier Crane himself, jilted by Diane in Cheers. It could be said that Frasier is the prototype Mediocre Filler Love Interest — pompous, supercilious, intellectual; designed to reflect Sam’s ignorance and to fulfil a side of Diane that he could never satisfy. He was only supposed to appear in a few episodes — discarded after a quick fling with Diane — but the series executives warmed to him. Slowly, over the course of the show, the writers (and Kelsey Grammer’s increasingly textured performance) turned this two-dimensional snob into something more, to the point that the show can’t even get rid of him after Diane leaves him at the altar. In some ways, every episode after this point — and indeed the entirety of the spin-off Frasier — is an attempt to answer the question, “What becomes of the Mediocre Filler Love Interest after they’re discarded?”
There are obvious similarities between Frasier and Donny — both are left at the altar, both suffer deep and crippling depressions as a result, both rush into another relationship, doomed to end in misery (Donny had Nancy, Frasier had Lilith), and both attempt to rebuild their lives despite frequent humiliating romantic failures. They mirror each other, so perhaps there’s a clue to Donny’s fate in the way Frasier ends for the titular character.
Frasier’s love life may not have a comprehensive conclusion at the end of the series. Who’s to say whether or not his big romantic gesture with Charlotte in Season 11 was actually successful, and whether he did actually get to grow old with her in San Francisco (although the threat of the regrettable Frasier reboot suggests that he did not). But at the end, Frasier attains a kind of deeper happiness — one nurtured by the love of his friends and family. It doesn’t matter if his gamble to Charlotte pays off — all that really matters is that he still believes in romantic love at all, and that he can still fight for it. Frasier could spend the rest of his life chasing and losing unattainable romances, and he would still be happy, because of the profound connections he has made with his father, brother, sister-in-law and best friend over the past eleven years.
One can hope the same is true for Donny — that even if he is destined to fail in romantic love forever, he can find a sense of peace elsewhere, that his treatment by Daphne and Niles does not define him. Perhaps it’s naïve. Perhaps it’s more likely that Donny would become a more concentrated version of the bitter divorce lawyer that unrequited love twisted him into. Perhaps it’s best not to know the truth — and we can all pretend that there was a Happily Ever After for Mr Chump.
