What the dominant narrative tended to underweight was the continuity: the fact that Fraser had kept working, that the work had kept being interesting in its own way, that the gap in visibility was not a gap in professional identity or artistic engagement. Doom Patrol ran for years. Trust was a legitimate production with a significant director. The Affair was mainstream television. None of these are the credits of someone who had abandoned the profession.
The narrative also tended to construct the Philip Berk disclosure as a more complete explanation for the career trajectory than the available evidence supports. It is a clean causal story: powerful man harms less powerful person, less powerful person’s career suffers, eventually justice is served. The story is appealing because of its clarity. But Fraser himself complicated the clarity, repeatedly, by noting his own uncertainty about whether the disclosure explained the career pattern, and by refusing to construct himself as the victim of a conspiracy he could not document.
The most honest version of the story — the one that requires holding multiple explanations in tension without resolving them into a single cause — is less satisfying as narrative but closer to what actually happened. The physical toll was real. The psychological consequences of the Berk incident were real, by Fraser’s own account. The market for his particular kind of film did shift in the years after the franchise era. The industry’s attention did move elsewhere. These things are all true simultaneously, and the relationship between them is one of the things that the dominant narrative tended to flatten.