Everything old’s about to be old again
A “Frasier” reboot is on the way, courtesy of an American movie studio launching a rebranded TV streaming platform and suddenly realizing it had nothing to stream. The cupboard was bare, the riverbed dry, the brain filled with cobwebs and dead birds, and who among us has not had that sensation this past year?
So Paramount Plus reached back into the deep past and pulled out a TV sitcom that had already indulged in the standard American habit of going on far too long for the sake of massive profits. Wring that pile of cash until it drips coins and corn niblets — remember when Niles Crane married Daphne? — and Frasier is out of Seattle and possibly in San Francisco now, maybe turning into his crotchety dad in an ugly chair while his son Frederick — he’s so literate! — works for a comedy tech monster Zuckerberg. Surely Frederick can’t be gay. His younger brother will be gay. Maybe. All the old jokes.
The source of all comedy is people not knowing themselves. The show was endlessly amusing, with Frasier under the impression he wasn’t a desperate man, Niles thinking himself the louche sophisticate rather than nature’s fusspot. But in 2021, there are different things that people don’t know about themselves, possibly much uglier things. Don’t reboot, start from there and find the comedy.
By definition, rebooting is failure. The trick of wonderful entertainment, which “Frasier” indeed was, is to come up with something new, or at least reach back farther than the 1990s. “Black Mirror,” a tech horror series begun in 2011 by TV critic Charlie Brooker, was as new as technology itself, something awful appearing every season from loping killer dog robots to brains that relooped memory forever.
“Breaking Bad” was new in 2008, not the crime but the chemistry, as were the time-lapse skies and filming from the back of the refrigerator. There are some things I want back from the “Frasier” era — great big flapping overcoats, literate jokes — but otherwise no.
I have grown suspicious. It’s not that new things are annoying but that they’ve actually been around forever, in an eternal reboot. “Wellness” à la Gwyneth Paltrow with vaginal eggs and candles is not new. It’s a reboot of the artisanal naughts — I recall attending evening cheese school — the manic primary-colours exercise of the 1980s, and 1970s soft rock.
In 1932, Stella Gibbons, an English advertising copywriter, wrote “Cold Comfort Farm,” a comic novel about the then-passion for rural idiocy, featuring sensible Flora, a sexual dim-wit named Elfine, and the lumpen Starkadder family. And here we are a century later, with passionately tiny homes and weekend retreats in hotels built of stone and twine.
Similarly and even further back, Mary Webb wrote “Gone to Earth,” a 1917 novel about a “a creature of the wild” named Hazel Windus who tried to sell people on the idea that sex was better outdoors, on bracken, with a woodsman. I used to think 2020 was rebooting hippies but it’s a much deeper plow than that.
Beards are back? They never went away. I suspect the new Frasier will be beardy. Perhaps Lilith will be, too.
Once there was Normcore and now there’s loungewear; it’s really just the same old androgynous dressing for people who can’t be bothered. Eventually these trends break down your resistance and there you are in pilling sweatpants and a green duvet coat. Unlike Frasier, I both know and see myself. I caved too.
If I may extrapolate on political rebooting, we were told Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole was new, but he’s really just an Andrew Scheer who joined the air force. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh appeared to be fresh and exciting but seems tired now. I see the same old male disdain in him: Women’s issues don’t rate, urban gun control does not spark his interest, he is not singular.
Singh doesn’t have the common touch, only the theory of it. Time for a change. Both parties have to find their own Justin Trudeau or Chrystia Freeland.
Americans are particularly drawn to rebooting in that they love ersatz novelty.
I may be in an excess of despair, but given the kind of men who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, who would gainsay that American social change appears only superficial. Or perhaps the American reaction to change is so stunningly violent and bloody that the vision of it sticks in the mind more.
There has never been a time more receptive to change, not that it matters because change will be forced on us. After we emerge from our fetid burrows, we will want fresh things. At some point, if only to mark this astonishing wrinkle in time, there will be great comedy about solitude, say, a new Charlie Chaplin.
There will be creative people left alone in a room, free to play, and with a renewed interest in visuals we haven’t seen before. These were the hallmarks of the streaming revolution.
They won’t reboot, they’ll invent and that’s what I will look forward to when hibernation ends. Make me laugh or else.