Frasier Review: Fans Might Hear The Blues A-Callin' After Seeing This Revival
Thirty years ago this fall, Cheers' resident shrink Frasier Crane moved to Seattle to headline his own NBC sitcom Frasier, which would go on to become one of TV's greatest and most acclaimed spinoffs ever. Now he's back with an all-new revival on Paramount+... but unfortunately, this new Frasier (debuting this Thursday, Oct. 12; I've seen the first five episodes) is a revival in name only. It feels more like a spinoff of a spinoff, taking the character of Frasier Crane and placing him in a generic, CBS-style sitcom with an inferior supporting cast, overly contrived plot mechanics and precious little of the original's signature wit.
I admit I had high hopes for this revival, being a big fan of both Cheers and the original Frasier, and it certainly is a pleasure to see Kelsey Grammer back in his element and dropping clever bon mots once again. (He hasn't lost a step.) But the new episodes are all too reminiscent of the recent one-and-done Murphy Brown and Mad About You revivals, lacking any purpose beyond pure nostalgia. Except this one is not even nostalgic, because it's not the Frasier we remember. It's something else entirely, and not as good. To put it bluntly, this version of Frasier is the kind of sitcom that the original Frasier was the antidote to.
When we catch up with Frasier Crane, he has stepped away from hosting a popular Dr. Phil-esque TV talk show and headed back to Boston to reconnect with his son Freddy, now played by Deception alum Jack Cutmore-Scott. Things between them are strained, though: Freddy dropped out of Harvard and became a firefighter, and he feels like Frasier doesn't respect his life choices. It's a clear attempt to replicate the thorny father-son dynamic between Frasier and his dad Martin (played then by the late John Mahoney), right down to rehashing the exact same fights, but the attempt falls flat. This Freddy doesn't resemble the young Freddy we knew, either physically or personality-wise, and the writers can't seem to figure out who this Freddy is, exactly. He's 33 years old, but the other characters treat him like he's 23. He's a blue-collar, beer-drinking dude who... stays at home at night reading Little Women?
Thankfully, Grammer still has all the pompous bluster we remember from Frasier's previous run, settling right back into his character's familiar foibles. ("What's the word on the streets these days about herringbone?") But the new cast falls far short of the standard set by the original. The highlight is Nicholas Lyndhurst, a veteran of British TV comedy, as Frasier's Harvard professor pal Alan. He doesn't quite make up for the glaring absence of David Hyde Pierce's Niles — who was Frasier's true star — but Alan is a unique comedic creation, always pickled in alcohol and ready with a stinging barb. Anders Keith has some fun moments, too, as Niles' son David, an awkward Harvard undergrad with too many allergies to count. But his Niles-esque one-liners just make us miss Hyde Pierce all the more.
Freddy's single-mom roommate Eve, played by Jess Salgueiro, is just a cookie-cutter quippy millennial, and Alan's Harvard boss Olivia, played by Toks Olagundoye, makes absolutely no sense as a character, or as a human being. Her personality changes from scene to scene to fit whatever the plot needs at any given moment. Plus, the episodes are loaded up with misunderstandings that are too stupid for people this smart, stakes that are entirely made up just to set up an easily solved conflict, and punchlines that are a far cry from the original's refined subtlety. (The show's original writers are gone, replaced by How I Met Your Mother's Chris Harris and Life in Pieces' Joe Cristalli.) It's all brighter, louder and more frantic than the soothingly low-key Frasier we remember.
To be fair, the revival does begin to find its stride in later episodes, especially when it leans into the proudly pretentious tone of the original. (We even get a conversation spoken entirely in Latin!) But beyond the superficial similarities — the pithy title cards between scenes, Grammer crooning "Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs" over the end credits — this just isn't Frasier. There's no Niles, no Martin, no Daphne, no Roz... not even a single guest appearance from a familiar face in the first five episodes. In fact, the scripts contain as many nods to Cheers as they do to Frasier. (And we don't get to see any of the Cheers gang, either.) The biggest disappointment of this Frasier is how little it resembles the Frasier we know and love. It's as different from Frasier as Frasier was from Cheers... and this time, not for the better.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Frasier Crane is back, but everything else is different in the Frasier revival, a disappointing revamp that lacks the original's signature wit.