The return of Kelsey Grammer’s snobbish psychiatrist Dr Frasier Crane has been highly anticipated. But while it’s pleasant enough, it doesn’t live up to the original, writes Caryn James.
I
In the midst of an argument, the psychiatrist Dr Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) calls his son Oedipus. Later, when he learns that the reason behind someone’s nickname is the least obvious possibility, he declares “Take that, Occam’s razor”. Highbrow references scattered through worn-out sitcom tropes with a live-audience laugh track – all that shapes the rebooted Frasier just as it did the original. The old show, which ran from 1993-2004, was one of the biggest hits of its time, winning 37 Emmys, including five for Outstanding Comedy Series.
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Its successful formula was always based on a benign class conflict within the Crane family. Frasier was a snob but not a meanspirited one, his cluelessness saving him as a likeable character. His father, Martin (John Mahoney), was a lovable, irascible retired cop without any patience for the opera and fine wine preferred by Frasier and his equally fussy brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce). A brainy lead character is no guarantee of a smart show, but with sharp writing and swift pacing, the old Frasier was smarter than most, especially in an era before streaming sites offered many edgier options than the networks.
The reboot, which picks up two decades later, is more of a pleasant throwback than a reinvention, and that seems to be the point. This new series does everything possible to echo the old, including replacing its missing characters with facsimiles.
Frasier is back in Boston, where he was the unlikely regular at the bar in Cheers before he got his own spin-off series. Mahoney died in 2018, so filling the working-class slot, we have Frasier’s son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who has dropped out of Harvard to become a fire fighter, as if salt-of-the-earthiness skipped a generation.
Hyde Pierce chose not to be in the reboot, but instead there is Niles’s son, David. He is played by Anders Keith, a newcomer with expert comic timing, who enlivens every scene he is in. He makes David a delightful echo of Niles, as a nervous, socially inept Harvard student, almost as grandiloquent in his speech as his uncle.
But with the exception of David, the new characters never take off. There is a Cheers-like bar where Frasier hangs out with his one-note old Oxford classmate, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst), a psychology professor at Harvard who loves Scotch whisky and hates to work. They also meet there with Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the ambitious head of the university’s psychology department. She is desperate to recruit Frasier, who in the years between series has become rich and famous doing a television version of his old radio call-in show; this fictional Harvard is relentlessly silly. And Freddy’s roommate, Eve (Jess Salgueiro), is a waitress at the same bar (really, Boston isn’t that small) and vaguely echoes the common-sensical Carla from Cheers.
Grammer, as always, has impeccably sharp delivery and timing, and the show has fun skewering Frasier’s elitism. In a pompous tone, he tells the sleep-deprived mother of a crying baby, “Cherish these times. They disappear with a cruel swiftness”, only to find that the sound of his voice puts the infant to sleep. That’s funny once. That the joke is repeated gives Frasier its creaky sitcom feel. The reboot is full of such obvious tropes.
And there is a more serious problem, a huge hole in the centre. Freddy is flatly written, even for an exaggerated comic figure, and blandly played. The obvious idea is to reverse Frasier’s dynamic with his own father, who was most at home sitting in his old duct-taped recliner drinking a beer. But Mahoney made Martin witty and lively. Freddy is just a warm glass of milk. The reboot falls flat whenever Frasier and Freddy spar, a dynamic that is meant to be the heart of the show.
Uneven though it is, the series has promising signs. Episode three includes a hilarious flashback to Frasier’s television show, in which he gives advice while wearing a plumed hat he calls a thinking cap, and which has a bouncy theme song with the lyrics, “Dr Crane, he can fix your brain”. If the reboot had leaned into that kind of satire more often, it would have had a fresher edge, and it possibly still can. But the first five episodes sent to critics don’t suggest that the show is interested in pursuing fresher possibilities.
Unlikely to grab viewers who didn’t love the original, it fits comfortably on Paramount+, home of all those Taylor Sheridan middle-of-the-road shows and CBS sitcoms that traditionally skew to older audiences. Walking into a tradition-bound private club panelled in dark wood, Frasier says, “This place is so stuffy”, and Alan replies “I love it!” The new Frasier is driven by, and hampered by, that love of the old.
Frasier launches on 12 October on Paramount+ in the US, and on 13 October on Paramount+ internationally.
★★★☆☆
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