It’s a classic Frasier scenario: In the first episode of Paramount+’s revival of the Kelsey Grammer sitcom, characters keep piling up at a dinner party. Many of them, classically, are pretending to be someone else or in the middle of some scheme. Frasier is encroaching on the life of his son Freddy, who rebelled against his father’s pretensions by becoming a firefighter and is living with Eve, a woman he’s pretending is his girlfriend. In comes Frasier’s nephew, Niles’s son David, with needs of his own, as well as members of the Harvard psych department who are hard at work wooing Frasier to join them. The episode is directed by James Burrows, the legendary director of much of the original run and its predecessor Cheers, and you’ll recognize his touch. Doors slam, characters speed in and out of the kitchen, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Eve (Jess Salgueiro) try to sneak a stroller past Frasier as he’s crawling on the floor looking at Cheerios. When you squint, the events of the pilot almost resemble the farcical shenanigans that made the original so great. “I’m no stranger to an underperforming dinner party,” Frasier mutters as the evening goes south, a line meant to wink at how Frasier the revival is continuing a tradition established by the original show but which also fits as a description of this show itself: The elements are there, but as it launches anew, the revival isn’t yet running at full speed.
Still, this iteration’s creators, Chris Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and Joe Cristalli (Life in Pieces), have hit on a clever enough way to reassemble the family dynamics of Frasier. The show kicks off with Frasier touching down in Boston after the funeral of his father Martin to check in with his son, who’s followed in his grandfather’s footsteps by taking up a blue-collar career. That neatly reverses the series’ original generational conflict, so that father and son are embarrassed of each other for opposite reasons, though as a comedic presence, Cutmore-Scott’s Freddy is more ill-defined than Martin ever was. Freddy comes across as more of a generic straight man than a character with a clear comedic gambit of his own (though funnily enough, Cutmore-Scott, like Mahoney, is British). Once Frasier starts meddling in Freddy’s life, he inevitably ends up staying in Boston. Like Carrie Bradshaw, another ’90s character brought back into the present day, Frasier’s now ridiculously flush with cash, which eliminates a lot of conflict, but he still takes up that job in the psychology department, then buys the building in which Freddy and Eve live. Even after we learn what’s really going on between her and Freddy, Eve, too, is mostly stuck as a straight woman, Daphne-ishly taking care of the other characters without getting a chance at the flights of absurdity Jane Leeves would pull off. The two of them, at least so far, are as disappointingly generic as the Ikea floor-model design of their sitcom apartment.
The other new characters have more clearly established dynamics and play better as the type of archetypes that flourish in a farcical world. Toks Olagundoye’s Olivia, head of the Harvard psych department, is ruthlessly ambitious and a little like Roz, while Nicholas Lyndhurst’s amiably tenured professor Alan, an Oxford classmate of Frasier’s, recalls any number of original-run guest stars who played Frasier and Niles’s most pompous friends. Speaking of Niles, David (Anders Keith) is clearly intended to be a stand-in for David Hyde Pierce, who has stated he’s not interested in returning to the show. As an actor, Keith’s good at playing in a similar vein of tightly wound anxiety — he’s got great timing and gets to do silly bits like apply eye drops in the middle of a conversation — though it’s a thankless task to labor in the shadow of someone as gifted as Pierce. Until he’s had the space to develop David into someone more specific, the character will always remind you of who’s not on screen. (As a secondary quibble, considering that the original series played in a 1990s-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” sandbox with coy hints that Niles and Frasier had some very gay qualities, it’s frustrating that this revival doesn’t take the opportunity to be, well, more gay. A pity!)
This, plus the fact that the other characters all have Frasier-ish personas, gives the reboot a looking-glass quality, not quite Frasier, but not quite far enough from Frasier to stand on its own legs. The show’s most successful jokes so far tend to be niche allusions to events and characters back in Seattle (there’s a great little passing reference to KACL’s own Bulldog). Luckily, the revival doesn’t spend all its time reminiscing, but every time it does, it makes the cardboard quality of Frasier’s new circumstances in 2023 Boston more apparent. They haven’t shown up in the first batch of episodes sent to critics, but Bebe Neuwirth and Peri Gilpin are also set to return to this series, and you worry that, standing next to the newer characters, they’ll blow them out of the water.
What this iteration of Frasier resembles most are the network-sitcom revivals of the late 2010s, back when NBC Lazarus’d Will & Grace in 2017 and CBS brought back Murphy Brown in 2018. This makes sense, since Grammer, an executive producer of the revival, started talking seriously about bringing back Frasier half a decade ago when it seemed possible that the way to make sitcoms massively popular again was to just bring back all the massively popular sitcoms. If only Frasier had learned more lessons from those shows, which like this reboot, tended to broaden the tone of their original iterations, even as they labored to recreate the circumstances that made the originals click. Revivals tend to be cursed propositions on that front. You can’t make them exact replicas of what came before, because time has passed and circumstances have changed, but if you change too much (and say, put Frasier in jeans) you alienate the diehards. It’s odd to see how much effort Grammer has put in to make this revival happen, only for it to come across as a cautious, defensive maneuver. All that effort just to bring back this?
The funny thing about Frasier is that with this reboot, we’re two steps down the rabbit hole. The original series spun Frasier off from his Boston world in Cheers (and yes, now that he’s back, he does joke about how often he found himself drinking in that city) and took some time before it found its best, cleverest vein. With enough time, hopefully, the Frasier reboot will find its way into its own groove, though it can only do so by striking out further on its own. There are hints of possibility there, though mostly in what Frasier the revival doesn’t do. It doesn’t, for instance, lean too hard on the generational gap between Frasier and his psychology students for easy jokes about boomers and Gen Z (something that seems all too possible considering Grammer’s own politics), and it doesn’t waste all its time in callbacks to the original. But what is this show trying to be, when it’s making sure it’s not something else, or even not not something else? That’s a question of personal identity it might need to consult a psychologist to answer.
