Frasier reboot with Kesley Grammer ‘works supremely well’
How do you make Frasier, TV’s beloved shrink, relevant for his reboot? The writers say it takes courage, new characters – and analysis.
If you heard the blues a-callin’ in the mid-1990s, you will know there were few comedies as perfect as Frasier, a show beloved by millions, including model Kate Moss – who says the re-runs are her go-to bedtime watch.
The Cheers spin-off transplanted Kelsey Grammer’s pompous shrink from Sam Malone’s Boston bar to a flashy Seattle apartment that he shared with his dad, Martin (John Mahoney), a no-nonsense former cop who spent much of his time sitting in a battered, duct-tape-covered recliner (which Frasier loathed), wondering quite how he managed to sire our hero and his brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), another psychiatrist and opera-loving aesthete.
Frasier and the writers wore their learning proudly across more than 250 episodes between 1993 and 2004. Given that the show was about two shrinks, it was free to reflect openly on its characters’ conscious and unconscious drives while making high-minded, quick-witted jokes about literature and Copernicus or punning on Sigmund Freud quotes. At his school existentialist club, Frasier proudly told us, he was voted “the student most likely to be”.
Into this joyously distinct strand of American life came Frasier’s chief adversary, Martin’s dog, Eddie. A key ally, meanwhile, was Peri Gilpin’s Roz, Frasier’s happily libidinous producer, who some sensitive modern viewers now claim was “slut-shamed” on the show (though I always felt Frasier’s response to her lively sex life was the real joke here). Let’s not forget Martin’s carer, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves), who spoke with a slightly dodgy Mancunian accent and was loved unrequitedly by Niles until the penny finally dropped.
Frasier also had an ex-wife, Lilith (deliciously named after the first man Adam’s mythical she-demon first wife), who once called Frasier’s radio show to tell him that he was “doling out worthless little advice pellets from (his) psychiatric Pez dispenser”. Niles, who also regarded his brother’s radio job as demeaning of their profession, was married to a dreadful country club snob called Maris, who (unlike Lilith) never actually appeared on screen but whose self-pampering, obsessive calorie-counting excesses we regularly heard about. Maris, Niles gleefully discovered when thrashing out their divorce settlement, was also heir to a urinal cake fortune.
Frasier’s radio show talked of “good mental health” before the concept became voguish, and was able to revel in that quickfire wit alongside unrivalled moments of slapstick physical comedy.
So, just the kind of program to leave in the pantheon of comedy glory, right? Exactly the show not to bring back, especially in a 10-episode series co-starring, of all people, Nicholas Lyndhurst, aka Rodney from Only Fools and Horses? Well, Seattle, here’s the news. That’s just what they have done.
When I filed into a screening of the reboot late last month (and was served a breakfast of tossed salad and scrambled eggs in tribute to the original’s theme song), I worried that this might be a terrible TV comeback. But after a slightly exposition-heavy first episode, it works supremely well, and in episode two it really gets into its stride. I liked it a lot.
Of course fans are not alone in being wary. That the reboot’s co-creators, the How I Met Your Mother writer Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli, a writer on the Colin Hanks comedy Life in Pieces, also have been anxious is the first sign the new episodes are in good hands. They know how precious the legacy is.
“I have had a blindfold and the cigarette the last six months just waiting for the execution,” Cristalli, 37, jokes on Zoom from his home in Buffalo, New York. “God willing, people will like it.
“My biggest fear going into this thing – and they’re right – is all the superfans who are sceptical that Frasier is being handed over to an idiot and then they don’t know what they’re doing. And that’s my biggest fear, someone accusing me of ruining Frasier, because I love it so much.
“If it wasn’t my show and I was on the outside looking in, I would be fiercely sceptical and I would come into it thinking, ‘Why are they even trying to do this?’ But my hope is that it feels kind of new, (that) we found some new characters and some new fun stuff, not to retread but to expand on … It’s a crippling panic but I’m also very optimistic. I think people will enjoy it, but I am terrified.”
Cristalli has watched every episode of the original show multiple times and in fact was known for an old Twitter account called Frasier for Hire, where he pitched ideas for the show long after it had finished. He even sent a completed script to Grammer’s producers in which Niles is pursued by the Russian mob (“I took a couple of big swings”). But when Grammer said he was open to a remake, Cristalli knew he was too inexperienced to “get the keys to the kingdom”, so joined forces with his “old pal” Harris, 52, who had more producing and writing credits, and they pitched. Of the roughly 30 submissions Grammer read, theirs was the one he liked and the three of them began crafting their vision for the show.
In it Frasier returns to Boston – without Niles, after Pierce declined to be involved following what Harris calls “some lovely talks” and “really good feedback” (some reports offer a slightly more fraught description of the negotiations). The vision naturally changed, but the showrunners think it may have helped the show. There were already a lot of characters so Pierce’s decision “freed us to build a show from the ground up”, according to Harris, and create “a real third chapter as opposed to a chapter that’s bringing everyone back”.
In the new show Frasier touches base with his son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who has dropped out of Harvard and is working as a firefighter. There are obvious parallels here to Frasier’s relationship with his dad, but there is one key difference.
“Unlike Martin, Freddy can stand toe-to-toe with Frasier on the intellectual side – he went to Harvard, he just decided not to stay there,” Harris says from LA. “That gives us a little bit more to play with. Martin was incomprehensible to Frasier. But it’s even more incomprehensible to Frasier to have the opportunity to be like him and to purposely choose not to be that way.”
Lyndhurst plays an old Oxford friend, Alan Cornwall, a boozy, lazy but ultimately kindly “psych professor” in the same Harvard department who does things like declare, after drinking seven whiskies, that he is only “British drunk”. Anyway, Alan is clearly not the new Niles, possessing what Cristalli calls an unbuttoned “looseness” and a “totally different energy”.
Grammer insisted on hiring “Nick” after appearing with him in the English National Opera stage revival of Man of La Mancha in 2019 and said “This guy’s a killer”, the pair tell me. However, they and the network took some convincing. Only Fools and Horses may be a smash hit in Britain but it is barely known in the US.
“We were obviously hesitant,” Harris says. “We don’t know who this is. But then he came over and he did some lines for the studio and he’s a revelation and (we thought), he’s going to blow America away.”
The DNA of Niles, meanwhile, can be seen in his son David (Anders Keith), another Harvard student, who has inherited some of his father’s nerdiness and inability to talk to women. And we will be seeing Roz this series (she comes mainly to “give a big old hug to Frasier”). If there is a second series Daphne could return too, they say, and because Frasier is back in Boston some of the Cheers regulars may also turn up. For the moment there are nods to Cheers through the barroom scenes at a hostelry rather sweetly called Mahoney’s Tap Room in honour of Mahoney, who died in 2018.
Frasier has been criticised in recent years for being too white in its casting and it is clear that progress has been made in the reboot: for one, Olivia, the head of Frasier and Alan’s department, is played by a black actor, Toks Olagundoye.
“It just feels like Frasier was always one of the most evolved, highly intellectual shows around, so to bring it into 2023 it had to feel like it represented 2023,” Cristalli says. “Frasier is always the most evolved, smartest person in the room, he should be surrounded by what the world looks like. And we did that in front of and behind the camera.”
Another pleasing aspect of the reboot is the way it preserves the innocence of the original. I tell Cristalli and Harris that if Frasier were conceived today, the Martin-Frasier bust-ups might revolve around political differences, a clash not of beer versus fine wine or sport versus opera but of red and blue states. They agree – and were never going to go down that route.
“I personally love the fact that we were inheriting the non-political storytelling of the original Frasier,” Harris says. “It feels like a wonderful little island where we can visit … Sometimes there’s a push for a show to be as timely as possible. And Frasier, to its credit, went the other way and made an effort to be timeless. And hopefully we’ll find a similar groove with this show.”
I think they have. And it might even turn the Americans on to Only Fools and Horses.
The Times
Frasier screens on Paramount+ from Friday.