TV review: 'Frasier' returns as likable mixed bag

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- The latest classic sitcom to return with a streaming revival, Frasier, premiering Thursday on Paramount+, is less like a revival and more like a later season retooled after contract disputes.

The 19 years since Frasier ended necessitates some changes, but some choices risk jumping the shark. But like many of those seasons, the good parts are good enough to keep watching.

Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) arrives in Boston straight from his father's funeral. John Mahoney, who played Martin Crane, died in 2018.

In 1993, Frasier took Cheers' resident psychiatrist and made him a radio call-in show host in Seattle. When Harvard professor Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst) picks Frasier up at the airport, Frasier fills him in on his life since the 2004 series finale.

In the last 19 years, Frasier was doing a TV show in Chicago, which ended recently, as did his relationship with Charlotte, his love interest in the previous final season played by Laura Linney, who does not appear.

When Frasier visits his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), he discovers he is living with Eve (Jess Salgueiro), whom Freddy has never mentioned to his father. Frasier and Freddy have been estranged since Freddy dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter.

The new characters in Frasier fit in well.

Alan calls out Frasier's judgmental beliefs and tendency to mask insecurities with highbrow references. The head of Harvard's Psychology Department, Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), who wants to hire Frasier, struggles with being intelligent and successful while being neurotically single..

Freddy is a good foil for Frasier with his lowbrow taste, but there's clearly still love between them.

The one character who doesn't fit is David (Anders Keith), Frasier's nephew. David is the son of Frasier's brother, Niles, played by David Hyde Pierce for 11 seasons from 1993 to 2004.

David accompanies Frasier to Boston as a blatant replacement for David Hyde Pierce down to his voice and mannerisms.

Keith is just doing his job, but the creation of the character is entirely misguided. Rather than fill the void left by Pierce, it's the kind of cheap ploy a sitcom would employ when an actor quits.

If Pierce didn't want to or couldn't do the revival, the producers should have created new characters. Niles was once a new character created to be different from Frasier's Cheers gang. Freddy fills the role the late Martin once did, but at least he's not doing an impression of Mahoney.

The premiere episode constructs a mystery that critics have been asked not to spoil, and it does pay off less expectedly than a more predictable sitcom. It's just wrong for Frasier. Fans are eager to reconnect with the Crane family, not play games.

The show does balance those secrets and some people who know more than others, directing characters to come in and out of the kitchen in a lively farce.

Like the long-running '90s series, Frasier still balances a traditional sitcom structure with highbrow concepts. Episodes are full of puns and elaborate verbal constructions which the cast delivers.

No matter how smart he is, Frasier still has schemes that backfire. Some plots are predicated on misunderstandings that could be easily cleared up if one character just said what they meant.

Yet, the show makes the characters real. They're not just sitcom tools for shenanigans, although they are adept at physical comedy, too.

Frasier waxes philosophical about longing for the days when Freddy was a baby (the character was born during Cheers), coping with a new generation of young students and reflecting on the nature of celebrity.

Fans won't have to settle for imagining the 19 years between Frasier series. Clips of his Chicago talk show are an endearingly silly spoof of daytime television.

It is nice to see Frasier again, and there are more laughs than frustrations so far. Most sitcoms take a season to find their footing and that could still be true of the Frasier revival.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.