Thursday Movie Picks, February 23, 2023: Romance tropes: Friends to lovers (TV edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's the final week of February, which means that we have one more romance-themed entry to the blogathon; and, because it's the last Thursday of the month, that means it's a TV edition. This time, the theme is "friends to lovers". It was a theme that I have to admit was a bit difficult at first, but ultimately I came up with three shows:

Frasier (1993-2004). Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) moves from Boston after the cancellation of Cheers back to his home town of Seattle, where he lives with his father (John Mahoney), who is retired on disability. Dad's physical therapist Daphne (Jane Leeves) and Frasier's brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) fall in love over the course of the series, and if memory serves they got married after Niles' divorce from his never-seen wife, although that would have been after I stopped watching regularly.

I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). Astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) finds a bottle that just happens to contain a genie named Jeannie (Barbara Eden) who is happy to serve her new master, but who seems to keep getting her master into all sorts of comedic predicaments. The two finally got married halfway through the show's final season.

Grace and Favour (1992-1993). Better known in the US as Are You Being Served? Again!, the series starts off with the death of old Mr. Grace, bequeathing the few people (the mens' and ladies' wear departments from the original series, naturally) still working at the store a country hotel in a rural part of England. The place is next to a working farm, and the farmer's daughter Mavis falls in love with Mr. Humphries (John Inman) along the way. During an appearance Inman made on US public TV during one of the many pledge drives stations have, he suggested that if there had been a third series of episodes produced, Humphries and Mavies would have been married which would have given Inman one more chance to dress up as Mr. Humphries' mother.