![]() 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). 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.īlue 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. Well, isn’t that what families do? In sitcoms as in Phillip Larkin poems? 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?” Then again, you’ll never get those people to admit they like any revival even as they tune in. ![]() 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. 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. More cracking the knuckles than taking a big swing of any sort, in a good way. 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. Yet, for a man of 68, he can still fumble the most straightforward of emotional interactions with disdain for a good laugh. To that end, a bona fide celebrity now, Grammer’s vainglorious Frasier moves with a stiffness he never had before. Of course, Frasier did end almost 20 years ago and time kept moving on, in the real world and on the small screen. ![]() 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.įrom 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. 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. ![]() James Burrows On "Seamless" Return To 'Frasier' Alongside Kelsey Grammer, His Wish For The Show's Conclusion & 'Cheers' Nod In 'Ted Lasso'
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