New ‘Frasier’ is a tiresome update of a tired series
I can’t wait to spend more time with Frasier Crane . . . said very few TV viewers after he left the air in 2004 following nine seasons on “Cheers” and 11 seasons on “Frasier.”
Sure, there had been much pleasure over the years in looking down on the pretentious fellow who looked down on everyone else, but after 20 years of vainglorious quips and conspicuous wine-sniffing, that pleasure was running awfully thin. By the end of the Seattle-set “Frasier,” the writers had no new angles to show us of their intellectualized Thurston Howell III, and so they began to lean for material on tired-sitcom crutches such as marriage, pregnancy, and medical emergency.
Regardless, star Kelsey Grammer has brought his character back for another iteration, this time with an entirely new cast and a new old setting, Boston, where Frasier lived and frequented the “Cheers” bar before moving to the Pacific Northwest. He’s still exactly the same, dropping lines such as “Is houndstooth too whimsical?” and, now that he is a professor at Harvard, spewing giddy worship of the Cambridge college that also happens to be his alma mater. And not surprisingly, Grammer easily slips back into the role that brought him four Emmys, a tad older now but just as effortlessly superficial and flip. Frasier is filthy rich and famous on the new series, after a run on a “Dr. Phil”-like TV show, which only heightens his insufferability.
But while watching the first five of the season’s 10 episodes, my interest in seeing more of the character was never stoked, and I was bored with his moves only a few minutes into the premiere, which arrives Thursday on Paramount+. It’s a common problem among revivals — the shows left TV because they were creatively spent, and yet here they are again, hoping we’ll miss the characters enough to watch. Worse, the new ensemble around Frasier offers none of the excellence of the ensemble that surrounded him in the first “Frasier,” a group of extraordinary actors and characters — including David Hyde Pierce’s Niles and the late John Mahoney’s Martin — who had many different notes to play. Their absence only makes the new cast seem blander.
The members of the ensemble quickly become onenote figures, including Frasier’s Harvard dropout firefighter son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who serves as a foil for his father’s pretensions and not much more. Niles and Daphne’s son, David (Anders Keith), is also in the mix as a freshman at Harvard and student in Frasier’s psychology class who is neurotic and geeky and then more neurotic and geekier. Frasier’s old friend, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst), teaches at Harvard, and he and his boss, Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), each embody only one or two characteristics in their hangouts with the TV star — he’s lazy and boozy, she’s competitive and high-strung.
Reportedly, Bebe Neuwirth and Peri Gilpin will be back for visits in the second half of the season, as Lilith and Roz, respectively, but I fear that may only highlight the shortcomings of the new “Frasier.” Likewise, it feels less-than when the new show gives us the kinds of stage farce and witty inter-title cards that the original excelled at in its prime. At this point in the case of “Frasier” and Frasier Crane, more, almost 40 years after we first met the fussy guy, is less.