KACL (Frasier)

KACL (Frasier)

KACL (780 AM) is the fictional Seattle, Washington radio station on the television show Frasier. It broadcasts many talk radio shows, including The Dr. Frasier Crane Show between 2:00pm–5:00pm each weekday, Bob "Bulldog" Briscoe's top-rated The Gonzo Sports Show, and Gil Chesterton's Restaurant Beat. After Kenny Daly cancels The Gonzo Sport Show, Briscoe returns to the station to work in the archives room.

KACL follows an advice or lifestyle talk format and appears to offer little or no political talk programming, the dominant form of talk radio when the program was being produced; its programming is more representative of talk programming during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. For a while it was an all-salsa station, although this proved unpopular with the listeners and so it reverted to its all-talk format. The Dr. Frasier Crane Show was the first show back on the air.

Its station managers have included Ned Miller—who plans to fire Frasier to cut costs but is fired first—Tom Duran, Kate Costas, and Kenny Daly, and at the end of the show, Roz Doyle, who was Frasier's producer throughout the show's run. Among its owners have been "Big Willy" Boone, an elderly self-made media mogul from Texas, José Martinez (aka Joe Martin), who was the man responsible for (temporarily) changing KACL's format from all-talk to all-salsa, Poppy Delafield's mother, and Todd Peterson, a young twenty-something who made his fortune in the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Noel Shempsky, who has a long-term crush on Roz, works in accounting.

The Seabee awards ("the biggest award in Seattle radio") receive much attention from the staff each year. Frasier and Roz are nominated for or win the award several times.

Frasier dates several female co-workers at the station, the most prominent of whom, after Kate Costas, is Cassandra Stone (Virginia Madsen) in promotions.

Frasier and his brother Niles host the show together once. Niles then substitutes for him twice, once due to Frasier's illness, and once when Frasier is at a conference.

The station was named after the co-creators of Frasier, David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, taking the first letter of their surnames, with "K" representing the standard format for call signs of stations located west of the Mississippi River. KACL is also a cognate for "cackle", appropriately meaning a humorous laugh.