Back Where Everybody Knows His Name
Back Where Everybody Knows His Name
Frasier Crane returns to Boston in yet another '90s-sitcom reboot that's part "Cheers," part "Frasier," and part something new
OK, before I start, cards on the table: I'm biased. “Frasier" is my favorite TV show. And I really like the reboot.
I didn't watch "Frasier” during its original run, from 1993-2004, because my parents discouraged watching TV. I discovered the show in college. But as ill-versed in pop culture as I was at age 20, I still knew, somehow, that "Frasier” was a spin-off of the wildly successful sitcom, “Cheers." In fact, it’s regarded as one of the best spin-offs of all time. In this iteration, a newly-divorced Frasier had left Boston to take a gig as the psychiatrist host of a call-in radio advice show in his childhood home of Seattle.
Educating myself on the TV culture I'd missed out on, I'd later come to appreciate that the show was remarkable for standing very firmly on its own, through eleven seasons. No “Cheers" loyalty - or even familiarity - was needed by the viewer in order to enjoy "Frasier,” although, for those who did, well-placed Easter eggs were deeply satisfying.
"Frasier” came to a graceful and fulfilling end almost 20 years ago. But now, like so many TV shows of the ‘90s that once captured lightning in a bottle, it's been rebooted. It's currently streaming on Paramount+.
Considering the prospect of either ruining the legacy of one of TV’s best shows or - somehow, some way - actually improving it, many potential viewers assessed the likelihood of success and wondered, "Why do this?”
Because Frasier's story is not yet finished.
Capitalizing on millennials’ nostalgia for our childhood and teen years, reboots (and, Lord have mercy, live-action adaptations) of old favorites abound in the 2020s. But a reboot is a tricky thing. Usually, it won't quite work: times have changed, audiences have changed, the actors themselves have changed - and, crucially, writing teams come and go. And all of those factors change the way the end product is received. It's very, very hard to just get the band back together and start pumping out magic again, as if no time ever passed.
Kelsey Grammer was optimistic about Frasier's third act. He told the Independent that this version of the show might be funnier than the original run. Furthermore, he pointed out, “I'm good at playing him. We were funny together.”
If that's true - and it certainly is - then why has this reboot been such a disappointment to critics?
I think I know why it's not filling the Space Needle-shaped hole in reviewers’ hearts. See, despite the show’s name, it's not really “Frasier" anymore. It's something old and, at the same time, something entirely new.
First, though, do you need a refresher on the initial "Cheers” spin-off?
In the original sitcom, the antics of Kelsey Grammer’s wealthy, pretentious radio psychiatrist were perfectly augmented by David Hyde Pierce’s Niles, Frasier's lovelorn yuppie brother, who was just as sharp as Frasier and even more uptight, but, to Niles’ eternal chagrin, forever less appreciated than his famous brother. Both Grammer and Hyde Pierce found a foil in the excellent actor John Mahoney, who played their smart-mouthed, long-suffering father, Martin, a retired detective and man of the people who'd rather knock back a Ballantine and talk sports than suffer through his sons’ snooty operas.
There were also Peri Gilpin’s ferocious Roz, Frasier's man-eating producer and close friend, and Jane Leeves’ kooky, British Daphne, who begins the show as the live-in physical therapist of Martin, shot in the hip in the line of duty, and ends the show, against all odds, as the devoted wife of Niles and mother of his child.
Weaving together these well-developed, almost literary characters were a bunch of other factors: surgically-precise comedic timing. Incredibly tight writing. Perfect physical comedy. And, unusually for the time, a resolute refusal to draw laughs from contemporary pop culture or politics.
All of these factors mean that the original “Frasier" is a show you can still watch with total comfort and familiarity today. And I expect that the reboot will, in retrospect, have the same feel! But as the first few episodes trickle out, maybe what jumps out first is everything familiar that isn't there.
After all, as mentioned, there's no Niles - Hyde Pierce opted not to reprise his performance. There's no Martin - actor John Mahoney, arguably the soul of the show, passed away in 2018. There are no other returning actors, though Gilpin is slated to appear in a guest role, as is - bless her - Bebe Neuwirth, who played Frasier's wife and Freddy’s mother on "Cheers,” and his ex-wife in several episodes of "Frasier.” But still: there's no familiar Crane family, no Seattle, no radio show. There's no career striving. Frasier’s no longer the city's most eligible bachelor. So what's left?
Plenty. You just have to look.
In this reboot, Frasier’s back in Beantown, as he sings in the show’s closing theme. He's fresh off a twenty-year career as the Dr. Phil-style host of a wildly popular TV talk show. Television: that was always the tantalizing, if elusive dream, back in Seattle. He's single (I'm shocked - shocked, I say) and, having recently lost his father, Martin, is now looking to reconnect with his son, Freddy (played by Jack Cutmore-Scott). Freddy has grown up to be a firefighter and whip-smart Harvard dropout whom Frasier doesn't quite understand - though what does get through loud and clear is that Freddy is much more like Martin than Frasier, Martin’s son, ever was.
Frasier is persuaded to take a job teaching at that oft-alluded-to school in Boston, his alma mater. And he promptly re-creates the "Odd Couple” dynamic he shared with his everyman father by buying Freddy's entire apartment building, offering free rent to his son if he'll live together with him in one of the units.
Rounding out the cast are Anders Keith as Niles and Daphne’s son, Harvard student and Niles-like klutz David Crane, Nicholas Lyndhurst as Dr. Alan Cornwall, an old friend from Frasier's Oxford days who's now a colleague, Jess Salgueiro as Eve, Freddy's neighbor, dear friend, and the girlfriend of a fallen coworker at the fire department, and Toks Olagundoye as Olivia Finch, Harvard’s head of psychology, who is eager to convert Frasier's TV fame into renewed program interest from students and donors alike.
There's a lot here! Still, it smarts a little that there is no Niles, to banter and compete with; no Martin, to absorb the shocks of Frasier's short-sighted foibles and bring a much-needed dose of reality to the brothers’ yuppie dreamworld. There’s no Eddie, Martin's lovably mischievous Jack Russell terrier (played adorably by the astonishingly well-trained dogs Moose and, later, Moose's son, Enzo). There's no KACL radio station - there's no show at all. Instead, there are … classes.
Maybe it's hard for us, being back in school again after such a long break.
But the heart and humor of the original show remain. Grammer's comedic sensibilities and timing are perfectly intact. Lyndhurst is acidly witty and sweetly introspective - sometimes in the same sentence, and what an effect his portrayal has! Olagundoye is overeager, but almost painfully convincing, as a woman at the top of her game professionally, while still having some progress yet to make in her personal life. Keith could benefit from better writing, but plays Frasier’s (possibly neuroatypical) nephew with nervous, clumsy flair. He does seem utterly like the son of Niles and Daphne.
And Jack Cutmore-Scott? Wow. This is someone to watch, folks. Looking eerily like a young John Mahoney, he perfectly portrays Frasier's child-genius son, Freddy. Given only the finest of opportunities in education and life in general by his parents, onetime “Cheers" fixtures Frasier and ex-wife, Lilith Sternin (Bebe Neuwirth), Freddy was groomed to be Frasier's mini-me. Except, as Martin Crane learned in raising his boys - "Nancy-boys,” as Frasier and Niles were, in fact, called as children - you never know who that little person is going to turn out to be.
Freddy has turned out to be just as brilliant as Frasier and Lilith could have hoped. But he has no use for academia. He attended Harvard but left before finishing a degree, disliking the setting and the people in it. Instead, he embraces a blue-collar life: he works as a firefighter, he buys spirits of such low quality that his father grimaces just carrying the bottles, and he figures there's no reason a sweet air-hockey table can't double as somewhere to sit down for dinner.
Frasier thinks he doesn't know his son. In fact, he knows him all too well.
And, we find, so do we. Surely this new setup will be filled with career misadventures, zany dating catastrophes - can you imagine Frasier Crane on the apps? - and ever-expanding definitions of family and friendship. And loving little nods to the first run of the show are everywhere: a colleague of Freddy's is named Moose, after the canine actor portraying little Eddie. The bar where the professors hang out now is called Mahoney's, and Eve’s baby son is named John - both in tribute to John Mahoney, who epitomized the love of a sometimes-mystified, always-determined father in Martin Crane.
And, funnily enough, both Freddy and Frasier have been moved, at different times in their lives, to fib a little bit and tell their friends that the far-away fathers they resented had actually died.
Oh, the eternal push-pull between fathers and sons. That's it, really: Martin's legacy is the real reason for this reboot, this spin-off, this third act - whatever we may call it. Frasier Crane needed and eventually got the unconditional love and, more than that, the friendship, of a father who didn't necessarily understand him, but who fiercely protected and supported him anyway. Now, Frasier’s task is to become that father for Freddy.
That task won't be an easy one. I used to joke that the tagline for the original show could simply be, “Doctor, heal thyself.” Really, how can Frasier, so astute and insightful about what fuels the behavior of others, be so oblivious when it comes to managing his own life? But such contradictions are the essence of the human condition.
So as Dr. Frasier Crane and Kelsey Grammer embrace the full range and potential of this character, laughter is sure to be the best medicine. The first episode of the new run ends with a brief cutaway to footage of Mahoney, in character, telling the camera, “It all works out.”
I believe it does. And as it does, dare I say, I'm watching.