‘Frasier’ TV Review: Revival Finds Kelsey Grammer’s Snobby Shrink Back Like He Never Left

Dominic Patten
·5 min read
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Frasier is back.

Actually, Dr. Frasier Crane is so unobtrusively back in the Paramount+ revival debuting on October 12 that it’s truly as if Kelsey Grammer’s pompous and often hilarious psychiatrist character never left — truly.

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In an industry awash with alternative timelines as plot points almost as much as it is with creatively barren reboots and reunions, perhaps it would be better to peg the Frasier revival not as something new at all, but neither something old. Perhaps a more crystalline  perspective would be to view this Frasier as simply the charmingly chugging along 30th season of the beloved and acclaimed Cheers spinoff.

While clearly a subscriber lunge for Paramount+ in this age of streamer contractions, this 10-episode revival is indeed so blatantly a throwback to a very different era of television that to try to taint it as mere nostalgia is to miss the point. A little thinner on top, a little meatier around the middle, and sometimes a bit slower in its sitcom delivery, Frasier 3.0 emerges eternally itself in an ever changing world and media landscape.

From the too loud studio audience laughs, the staging, the set-ups and timing, the lighting, the improbabilities, the in-jokes (Yes, we are listening), and most of the conundrums and tropes the 2023 narrative employs, Frasier the revival strength is being exactly what you would expect if Frasier had never ended in the first place in 2004 after 11 seasons.

Of course, Frasier did end almost 20 years ago and time kept moving on, in the real world and on the small screen.

To that end, a bona fide celebrity now, Grammer’s vainglorious Frasier moves with a stiffness he never had before. Yet, for a man of 68, he can still fumble the most straightforward of emotional interactions with disdain for a good laugh. Grammer’s Frasier can also still block a kitchen door for comic affect with the best of them – which is kind of all you need to make the gig work again.

More cracking the knuckles than taking a big swing of any sort, in a good way.

Granted, this third act for Frasier, as Grammer has described the Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli run revival, now has the Boston skyline on the title card instead of Seattle, there’s an updated version of soundtrack song “Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs,” and, making sure everyone knows his name, Frasier himself is just coming off a lucrative run as TV talk show host. Additionally, the absence of  the late John Mahoney’s ex-cop patriarch, awkward and haughty sibling Niles, played for over a decade by the multiple Emmy winning David Hyde Pierce, and Jane Leeves’ eccentric Daphne Moon will leave a chill like a cold winter wind for some purists.

Then again, you’ll never get those people to admit they like any revival even as they tune in. Besides, as Nicholas Lyndhurst’s soused Harvard professor and old Frasier chum Alan Cornwall exclaims in the new episodes: “Damn it, why do family always get in the way of the important things in life?”

Well, isn’t that what families do? In sitcoms as in Phillip Larkin poems?

So, with sitcom maestro James Burrows directing the first two episodes, Harris and Cristalli deftly flip the script from the drop to deliver the same broad strokes roles that defined Frasier before but in slightly new hues here.

Blue collar homespun truths are injected into the show now via Frasier’s estranged firefighting son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), a Harvard drop-out who ends up closer to his father than he ever imagined. There’s some romantic tensions (not what you think) and guff from Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro), plus some high-brow sensibilities and real world pratfalls from Anders Keith as Frasier’s Ivy League attending nephew David (son of the long married Niles and Daphne).

Lyndhurst’s boozy Cornwall and Toks Olagundoye’s ambitious Harvard psychology department chief Olivia bring the workplace hijinks and moral dilemmas that defined part of the previous Frasier — with some significant time at the bar in pretty much every one of the five neatly packed episodes I saw.

Essentially, with an ever so mildly kinder and gentler Frasier leading the pack, the gang’s all still here figuratively. Literally, even Bebe Neuwirth and Peri Gilpin will be back in the second half of the revival to mock and adore the eminently mockable title character in their individual ways – just like the actresses did in the multi-Emmy winning original series as Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith Sternin and his radio call-in show producer Roz Doyle.

Which is kinda fun unto itself.

In that vein, in the first episode of the Frasier revival, Grammer’s character admits to some the shortcomings, if you will, of his present situation in life and winks to the past by saying: “I’m no stranger to an underperforming dinner party.”

No, you’re not a stranger to that Dr. Frasier Crane, but there’s no underperforming here.  As both Herman’s Hermits, one of the biggest bands of the 1960s, and later the Ramones declared: “Second verse, same as the first” – that’s a promise the Frasier revival delivers on.

Title: Frasier
Network/platform: Paramount+
Premiere date: October 12, 2023 with two episodes – with new episodes weekly. The show will also air its first two episodes on CBS on October 17
Director: James Burrows
Showrunners: Chris Harris & Joe Cristalli
Cast:  Kelsey Grammer, Jack Cutmore-Scott, Jess Salgueiro, Toks Olagundoye, and Nicholas Lyndhurst
Rating: TV-PG

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