Frasier revival to take place in a city where everyone knows your name
Dr. Fraiser Crane is returning to Boston, and James Burrows is returning to direct. Ok, we're listening.
Aux News Frasier
Oh, baby, we hear the blues a-callin’, and we’re hoping for the best.
There’s been a lot of concern about the upcoming Frasier revival. Namely, the only returning cast member is Kelsey Grammer, leaving behind one of the best ensembles in television history. Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Daphne (Jane Levees), and Rox (Peri Gilpin) won’t be on this upcoming Paramount+ season—though we’ve gotten word that Niles and Daphne’s son David (played by Anders Keith) will be on the show. While imagining a Frasier without Niles is hard, it isn’t unprecedented, and for the revival, Frasier’s going back to his roots: Boston, Massachusetts.
The character Frasier Crane first appeared in 1984 on Cheers before spinning off to Seattle, where he resided for 11 seasons on NBC. The seminal Boston-set sitcom was co-created by James Burrows, who will also be directing the first two episodes of the reboot. Burrows directed nearly every episode of Cheers and Frasier, so that’s another reason to be slightly more optimistic about the new show. It’s not like Burrows has been idle, either; the man directed all 246 episodes of Will & Grace, including the recent revival.
Deadline notes the core cast of the new Frasier, aside from Niles’ son, is Frasier’s son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott); Frasier’s college professor friend Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst); Alan’s boss Olivia (Toks Olagundoye); and Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salguerio). While we have no specific reason to speculate, the hope is that by setting this in Boston, some of the barflies from Cheers might show up, which certainly reframes the reboot. If we can’t have the Seattle crew, then the Boston one is an acceptable substitute.
In 2021, Grammer said he reached out to Hyde Pierce, Gilpin, and Levees about returning—we assume that they opted not to join or there was no place for them. He also said they would acknowledge the death of John Mahoney in the first episode. Mahoney, who played Frasier’s father on the show, died in 2017.
111 Comments
It’s funny that AV Club has dozens of articles about this show that we all know will last, like, 6 episodes tops.
Interesting. Because aside from this nonsense about the “AV Club”? That’s exactly what I said about Frasier in 1993.(P.S. Fraaaaaaajer!)
I’m going back to working under that bridge!
Same. I thought it was a stupid idea, and it ended up being one of my favorite shows, ever.
Look, I’ve been super hyped for things like the Cupid reboot, Drive, and a handful of other things that lived short, not necessarily bright lives. I…might try this.
How many episodes did that Murphy Brown reboot manage?
Night Court seems to be popular so far. Surprisingly.
anyone else imagining her naked under that robe?
well, not until now
It’s hard to predict what is going to be successful. I was reading an NYT article about how the Night Court reboot is doing much better than anyone expected it would, and it mentioned Murphy Brown. One of the thoughts behind why a reboot like Murphy Brown failed is because it was a bit more topical. Frasier probably skews closer to Night Court in that regard, the themes are more evergreen. That said, I don’t expect the Frasier reboot to be very good or last long.
None…none more episodes…
Its because they didn’t bring back the right characters
On the flip side, in 1993 people were saying that the spin-off starring not Norm or Cliff but the poindexter shrink from Cheers wouldn’t last six episodes, maybe a season tops, and in 1983 they were probably saying that the poindexter shrink who showed up as Diane’s love interest in one episode would only last six episodes, maybe a season tops. I think this might be a James Cameron type deal. Only a fool bets against Frasier Crane.
Funny how?! What does the AV Club amuse you?!Because if it does, you’re part of a shrinking minority!
i dunno these reboots tend to live on a lot longer than expected.
Oh Cousin Merle, really!
*boing*
Temper, temper. You know Cousin Merle ain’t been quite right lately.
He’s a master criminal!
Coveralls that don’t quite “Cover All”…
Especially Lisa but especially Bart!
Oh, I see: when it’s one of my schemes, you can’t foil it fast enough. But when Cecil tries to kill you? “It’s hopeless – utterly, utterly hopeless!”
I forgot to mention, I’m planning to blow up the dam with you inside.
That is one of my absolute favourite line readings in anything.
Hydrological and hydrodynamical? Talk about running the GAMUT.
“Rox”
Yeah, it’s a shame we won’t get to see any of our favourites. Rox, Nigel, Derphne…
Jane “Levees”
Where were you when the Jane “Levees” broke?
Who doesn’t love Roxanne “Rox” Moyle and her constant rebuffing of Dob “Dachshund” Driscoe’s advances?
I’m too young to have actually watched Frasier while it aired, but I always believed, from what little of it I did see, that it was probably the most boring show ever made. The show had a real stuffiness to it.
At least it wasn’t a show based off of a video game. Only a dope would want to watch live action cut scenes.
Cool story bro.
And you’d be wrong. Probably not for the first time.
Yeah, no zombies or superheroes. Kinda hard to watch imo.
No Zombies? Have you forgotten “Old man Crane, Old Man Crane, make him mad and he’ll eat your brain”?
The children have forgotten Frasier. What is a poor Gen Xer to do?No, seriously, watch it. The stuffiness is an intentional character trait Frasier has that’s always mocked and satirized. He gets hoisted on his own petard a lot. The writing is very sharp (as it was on Cheers, which is one of the best sitcoms of all time), and the actors are all very funny, especially David Hyde Pierce as Niles.
Absolutely. Frasier was a fucking blast to watch and the delight of it was the interplay between the characters, especially Frasier and Niles.
I’m rewatching it at the moment. I think if you took Niles out, it wouldn’t be half the show it was. Even Mahoney added something that made it special. Although I guess they were foils (or amplifiers, in Nile’s case) of Frasier’s “stuffiness”, as some young fool noted above, so maybe they looked funnier, but needed Frasier to bounce off.
Best part is that Niles was meant to be an occasional guest character and Hyde Pierce’s performance was so well received that he was almost immediately added to the main cast.
He gets hoisted on his own petard a lotIf you’re going to use the phrase, you should look up the meaning of petard. By, not on.
Hey thanks for writing an actual thoughtful response to my comment (unlike most of the others) and clarifying that the stuffiness is indeed intentional.Everyone else (mostly) can suck a tossed salad and scrambled eggs.
Hey, you’re welcome. Sorry people are razzing you. Last week some person decided to be an asshole to me on the Last of Us reviews, so I know the feeling. Even meant as good-natured ribbing (which my experience was decidedly not—this guy must have been having a bad week and so lashed out), comments can come across as hurtful. Good you didn’t let it get you down. And Frasier really is a wonderful show. If you appreciate the genre of farce, this show, more than most, does it very well.
The same guy commented on one of my posts last week too I think! It’s really strange (but not unusual for the internet) how few people here actually want to write thoughtful responses and engage in a discussion. Who would have thought that my pseudo-joke about how I thought Frasier was boring when I was 8 years old or whatever would bring out all the staunch Frasier defenders and trolls. I haven’t gotten this much hate mail since I said that ‘Best in Show’ was my least favorite movie. People are supposed to be able to enjoy different things right? Anyway, keep fighting the good fight my friend.
The characters were pretty good, but I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to enjoying multicam sitcoms, and at least 75% of the shows were the “Guy has to be with two different people at the same time without them knowing” premise. It was formulaic as hell, but at the same time pretty well made formulaic. That said, if you aren’t nostalgic for it, I don’t think there’s much there for you with this revival, and I can understand somebody too young not wanting to go back and get into it.
not only did Frasier have to juggle two girlfriends at once, but in one episode so did his dad Martin!
They drank from that well a lot
you rock bro!
“Barely saw thing; makes a most extreme value judgment about aforementioned barely-watched thing.”Thanks for the input, dude!
You’re wrong, and you’re a grotesquely ugly freak.
It really was. It’s a show that my mom will sometimes watch while doing something else on her tablet, and then eventually fall asleep. Dull as dishwater, and I don’t know how anyone saw it as being anywhere near funny. Same thing with ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’..
Putting Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond in the same zip code tells me a lot about the value of your opinion.
Putting that much shitheadedness toward someone else’s opinion tells me a lot about your value in general. Both are just something that’s usually on right before Jeopardy!..
Sounds like Frasier himself will be the Martin to this group of upstart youngins. I’d be down with that, I think.
I suspect Freddy is going to be the new Martin, and Niles and Daphne’s son is going to be Niles.
Looking forward to the prequel series to this sequel series, set from Chicago to Boston with Frasier on the road solving crimes. Maybe have Rian Johnson write it. Anyway, kinda always saw Frasier moving to the south of France to retire. Staying in the US just seems too… limited.
Oh man, he’s still gonna have the chair, isn’t he? That hadn’t occurred to me until just now.
Hope so.
Please have a few episodes set in Cheers. If he’s back in Boston it makes sense he’d drink at Cheers!
Maybe they will bring back Shelly Long and Bebe Neuwirth?
Bebe? Yes, please! Long? Not so much…
Didn’t the original series end with Frasier flying off to Chicago for a new love?
It did, but it’s certainly possible Frasier decided to leave Chicago at some point in the last 20 years.
Toks Olagundoye is brilliant at comedy. I still mourn the loss of her sitcom Neighbors.
^This – The Neighbours deserved much better than a paltry two seasons. Not only was Jackie Joyner-Kersee a great character on her own merits, but her channelling of a Real Housewife (complete with diegetic asides to a camera that wasn’t there), and her enthusiastic Blind Side-ing of a small child, were utterly magnificent.
Wait. Nicholas Lyndhurst is in this?
Rodney Trotter!?!?That’s some serious UK comedy royalty right there
You plonker!
You can’t have Frasier without a comedy British accent.
..or five.
At least it’ll be a proper British accent.
Although: what if they’ve got him doing an American accent…
That depends on which accent he decides to use. Most of the dodgy British accents on Frasier came from Brits.
Yeah, everyone loved Rox, which was definitely the name of one of the characters on the show.
“He also said they would acknowledge the death of John Mahoney in the first episode. Mahoney, who played Frasier’s father on the show, died in 2017.”It’ll go back to the original ‘Cheers’ continuity that his father is long dead, and reveal that the events of ‘Frasier’ were just an elaborate hallucination.
A hallucination based on a hopeless radio jingle composer who once worked for the bar.
And a journalist who covered Woody’s election to the City Council.
Beer and pretzels that’s our game.. C H E R S.
I got you, babe!
Cheers and St. Elsewhere exist in the same universe so. . .
yes! YES!! DO IT YOU COWARDS!!! First episode we see a now old Tommy staring in to his snow globe and we are then greeted with this image we then go to the interior where Dr. Victor Erlich is helping Dr. Frasier Crane up off of the floor after the latter has been hit in the head by Carla by accident. Was Seattle all a dream? We’d have to ask Tommy
We should celebrate with cake!
Still can’t believe Rodney Trotter is in this. What a plonker.
“While we have no specific reason to speculate, the hope is that by setting this in Boston, some of the barflies from Cheers might show up, which certainly reframes the reboot.” In most circumstances it would be ridiculous to think that the old characters would still be in the same situation 30 years later, but for Cliff and Norm…
In fact, I think they should have gone the whole way and made it a Frasier and Cheers reboot, called, oh I don’t know, Frasieers?
Wait. He’s got loads of money. He should buy Cheers.
I like to think Woody owns it now. Sam retired.
…died on the waitlist for liver transplants. But seriously, that’s why I expect they set it in Boston. Also Seattle no longer being the “cool” city it was in the 1990s, which is why I suspect they set it in Seattle in the first place.
The first thing that came into my mind was “Norm drank himself to death”
I think some of the worst episodes of Frasier were the ones where they brought Cheers characters in. The tone of the shows is different enough that it just didn’t work IMO.
But this would be a new show that can set its own tone. Although I agree on the Cheers characters appearing on Frasier (with the obvious exception of Lilith).
Oh gosh, I should have mentioned Lilith as an exception. In my mind I don’t even think of her as a Cheers character, that’s probably why she didn’t even occur to me. I’m personally of the camp that thought Frasier was a far better show than Cheers.
She makes the one from the Bible look like a vacillating cream-puff.
Those episodes weren’t great but I did like the ones with Diane and Woody.
The one where Woody comes to Seattle was pretty good.
I did rather like when a character from Cheers showed up they addressed the retcon the creators pulled for the spin-off, namely that Frasier explicitly said that his father was dead and that everyone at Cheers thought he was an only child.
Cliff would 100% have died in the first COVID wave.
They’re still working. John Ratzenberger was just on an episode of Poker Face.
Also I wonder if they’ll do something honoring Rebecca.
Everyone forgets Ol Rox
OMG I SO WANT THIS TO BE FRASIER AND SAM SHACKING UP AS ROOMMATES!!!!!!!
“While we have no specific reason to speculate, the hope is that by setting this in Boston, some of the barflies from Cheers might show up, which certainly reframes the reboot.” I hope that means that Paul’s coming back.
The best part is when he calls his son Eric a ‘dumbass’.
I bet the show craters as fast as Old Murphy Brown did.
Is it Philly? Because everyone’s name is “Yo!”
Are they going to continue the bit of having one character you never see like Maris and Norm’s wife Vera?
I’m trying to be excited for this but, like – the fact that it’s him with the original Cheers director isn’t exciting me. Old-school sitcoms do NOT hit the way they used to, there’s too much competition and laugh-tracks and everything sound increasingly absurd.
For instance, we turned The 90’s Show off after 10 minutes of the first episode, and we’re still trying to figure out who the hell that was for and how the jokes are meant to be funny.
There seems to be something missing in modern attempts at multi-camera sitcoms. I think it’s in the acting/directing area. You can see it on Night Court where John Larroquette is the best thing about it, and all the other actors seem to be pitching their performance to the rafters like they’re on a Disney sitcom. Everything’s BIG, everyone’s a little louder and broader than they need to be, they hit their comic beats and punchlines with a sledgehammer. There’s a craft to acting in a multi-camera sitcom that’s (apparently) been somewhat lost. You have to go a little bigger than the naturalism in a single-camera to sell the emotion/joke/whatever, but not SO big that it just comes off as “high school play” levels of overacting.
The problem with the character of Frasier Crane is that he is at his best when he has someone as smart as he is (or smarter) to butt heads with. On Cheers, this was Diane, first, and then Lilith. Lacking either of them in a scene or episode, Frasier’s shtick quickly wore thin.On Frasier, of course, it was Niles. Any episode where Frasier didn’t have Niles in the immediate vicinity puncturing his ego balloon became a slog.This is because Kelsey Grammer is a man who is so egregiously full of himself that, unchecked, he indulges in his worst whims when acting – and it’s glaringly obvious that his worst whims are awful. Watch any Frasier episode he directed. Watch the final episode where he is allowed by the showrunners to wallow in his own self-importance for nearly the entire runtime (the only line that anyone ever remembers from that final episode? Niles saying, “I’ll miss the coffees.”).A Frasier reboot with nobody around to knock him down a peg – no Niles, no Roz, and no Martin – sounds like absolute hell on earth. No thanks, Paramount+.
Let’s just go ahead and revive Cheers, then.
“Burrows directed nearly every episode of Cheers and Frasier….”Much as James deserves worship, he directed 237/275 of Cheers eps, and just32/264 of Frasier eps.
“Rox”??