Frasier’s return was inevitable in our reboot-infested era. Roseanne, Will & Grace, Murphy Brown, One Day at a Time, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air: they’ve all made comebacks over the last decade, with varying degrees of success. So it was only a matter of time before Kelsey Grammer once again donned his tweed blazer and brandished his grandiloquent vocabulary— especially since the 90s sitcom classic about a family’s internal culture war turned into a surprisingly popular pandemic rewatch. Served up by a dream ensemble including David Hyde Pierce, the late John Mahoney, Jane Leeves, Peri Gilpin and Bebe Neuwirth, the original Frasier’s eleven gently prickly seasons offered perfect comfort viewing, particularly at a time of uncertainty and dread.
Rebooting an old favorite in a way that retains its original charms but updates the template for a different cultural era is ridiculously tricky, which is why so many much-anticipated remakes sputter out, leaving a fog of disappointment in the air. The new Frasier’s level of difficulty was increased by the fact that none of those original cast members would be joining Grammer (apart from a few cameos later in the season). So all that’s left of the old Frasier is….Frasier.
Instead of starting from scratch and conjuring up something entirely fresh, though, this Paramount+ series tries to reconstitute the show’s beloved dynamics with an almost entirely new cast of characters and ensemble of actors. In time, the formula may work. But right now, the organic warmth that inspired the pandemic binging isn’t there yet.
In 2023, Dr. Frasier Crane is at loose ends, having just buried his father and quit his successful Dr Phil-type TV show, Dr. Crane. It made him a household name, but he’s tired of being a showman. Frasier longs to be taken seriously. (What else is new?) During a brief visit to Boston to see his son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and deliver a guest lecture at Harvard to the class taught by his old pal Alan (veteran British actor Nicholas Lyndhurst), Frasier is offered a gig equal to his ambitions: a professorship in the Harvard psychology department.
The original Frasier revolved around a class clash between pompous liberal sophisticates (Frasier and his equally erudite brother Niles) and red-blooded Americans (embodied by their cantankerous retired-cop dad). This time around, multiple characters have been assembled to fill Niles’s shoes. Alan is a withered, eccentric academic who takes perverse pride in neglecting his teaching duties. Popping in and out of the storyline for no real reason, there’s also Niles and Daphne’s son David (Anders Keith), a Harvard student who takes after his father. A snobby fusspot, he carries a laminated card listing his allergies, explaining earnestly that “the ones in red are fatal.”
Substituting for Frasier’s blue-collar dad is his blue-collar son, who dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter. While Frasier drinks pricey Macallan scotch, Freddy drinks a cheap alternative called scootch. “This reminds me of a place one would wrestle a rat for a crust of bread,” Frasier says snidely about Freddy’s (perfectly fine) apartment. The son, meanwhile, tries to hack away his dad’s pretensions: “Aren’t you late for the boarding school where you teach unruly adolescents the true meaning of poetry?”
Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), head of Harvard’s psychology department, slips into Roz’s role when she lures Frasier to take a teaching job there. Frisky, manipulative and competitive, Olivia’s character seems far less well sketched out than some of the others, though Olagundoye brings glee to the role.
I got several episodes in before I recognized the chemical imbalance at the heart of the reboot. Grammer overshadows everyone sharing the screen with him other than Lyndhurst, an English comedy legend best known for the 1980s sitcom Only Fools and Horses. Even though Grammer’s been away from the part for nearly 20 years, Frasier fits him like a glove—a very expensive Italian leather one. Grammer switches flawlessly between physical comedy and waspish wordplay, glowing with charm even when his character is being patronizing or domineering.
I know way more than I’d like to about real-life Grammer, from his supporting role as a cad in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to his praise for Trump. But all of that washes away the instant he takes charge in Frasier—which he does in almost every scene. Poor Freddy feels like a moderately hunky placeholder by comparison, unlike his gruff grandfather, so memorably played by Mahoney. He can’t possibly function as a counterweight in the generational tug-of-war this series is built around. And there’s a fatal implausibility to the scenario: how on earth could the conjoined loins of Lilith and Frasier have produced this earnest bro?
For the faithful, the show offers a few cute shout-outs to the past —in particular, Frasier and his academic gang take to hanging out at an Irish bar with Freddy’s firefighter pals that bears a passing resemblance to Cheers. (The place, sweetly, is called Mahoney’s.) Just like in the original series, silly episode chapter titles such as “Downton Tabby” and “A Psychiatrist and a Firefighter Walk into a Bar” punctuate every episode. Grammer once again croons the jazzy-bluesy closing theme, “Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs.” (I still have no idea what those lyrics are about.) The furniture and interior decor seem to have been stashed in a stage-scenery storage room for three decades and brought out for continuity’s sake. Even the canned-sounding live studio audience laughter sounds like a flashback to the 1990s.
So much of the look and sound of the original Frasier has been reconstructed—yet the spirit has gone AWOL. Perhaps we should’ve known that scrambled eggs wouldn’t keep for 19 years.
