Frasier Crane, tossed salad, and scrambled eggs return in trailer for revival series
Frasier Crane is back, and he hears those blues a-callin'…
TV News Frasier
Baby, we hear those blues a callin’: Tossed trailers and scrambled eggs. Which is to say that, after literally years of building the idea up—mostly, admittedly, on Kelsey Grammer’s endlessly enthusiastic part—we finally have our first real glimpse at Paramount+’s Frasier sequel series today, as the streaming service unleashed the first trailer for the show early this morning.
What’s the Frasier revival actually about?
Said trailer lays out the premise (previously revealed in various reports about the show) pretty simply: Frasier Crane moves back to Boston to reunite with his son Freddy (now played by Jack Cutmore-Scott), only to discover that his relatively normal kid finds him about as insufferable as the rest of the human race always has. And so, in an inversion of the “blue collar dad, effete sons” formula of the original series, the two men find themselves needing to reconnect, while Frasier carves out yet another new life for himself (which seems quite a bit like his old life, honestly, except he’s a college professor now, instead of a radio host).
Who stars in it (besides Kelsey Grammer)?
Among other things, the trailer gives us a quick run through of the show’s new cast: That includes Jess Salguiero, who plays Freddy’s girlfriend, Eve; Toks Olagundoye as Olivia, a colleague at the school; and veteran British sitcom star Nicholas Lyndhurst as Alan, an old friend of Frasier’s. Perhaps in the interest of keeping the show from being overwhelmed with nostalgia, the trailer notably doesn’t tease announced appearances from either Bebe Neuwirth or Peri Gilpin; it also only gives us about half a second of Anders Keith’s character David, the son of Daphne and Niles from the original series.
Who’s making the Frasier revival?
In addition to Grammer, who serves as an executive producer on the series, the show is also the brainchild of How I Met Your Mother alums Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli. The creators at CBS Studios have also tapped a verifiable TV legend to direct the show’s first two installments: Cheers co-creator James Burrows, who also directed 32 episodes of the original Frasier. (Meanwhile, Grammer directed the new series’ seventh installment; he previously directed 36 episodes of the old show.)
Does the new Frasier capture that old Frasier magic?
The overriding question presented by the trailer, though (and the one we suspect the show is going to struggle to answer throughout its 10-episode initial run) is whether this version of Frasier Crane is actually any damn fun to be around anymore—i.e., whether seeing him inevitably talk down to every person in his orbit works as well when the character is an older man condescending to the younger generation as it did back in the 1990s. One of the secrets of the original Frasier was that Frasier himself was almost always the most insufferable person in the room; it was only by surrounding him with people able to bring him down to size—whether it was his father, his co-workers, or, most notably, his even more pretentious brother Niles, with David Hyde Pierce’s absence felt sorely here even in 90-second trailer form—that the show was able to make him even vaguely sympathetic. The series will live or die based on whether Grammer can still be the right kind of unlikable, and whether the people around him are up to the task of keeping him in check.
When does the Frasier revival come out?
Frasier premieres on October 12 on Paramount+. A behind-the-scenes special, titled Inside The Series, will air on October 6.
101 Comments
They’ve been advertising it at the MBTA stations in Boston, and they’re REALLY leaning on the Cheers connection.
doesn’t look half bad, but it’s funny how these reboots already feel like a relic from 5-10 years ago.
There’s this weird valley, where they look lit up like a Disney show.
yeah the digital flatness and over-lighting looks bad
There’s athat brief shot of the place with a fireman’s pole that reads EXACTLY to me as a ‘cool’ home from a Nickelodeon sitcom. Big iCarly vibes in that one instant.
it also just occurred to me that the college professor conceit means that half of these episodes are going to be about cancel culture.
Since he’s Trumper, that’d be perfect for Kelsey Grammer.
As a soon-to-be PhD who took one look at the tenure-track market and fled for dear life, I’m amused at how often TV characters can just wander into any old university and nab a teaching gig. Must be nice.
The magic of Frasier was Frasier-Niles-Martin.
And I’d add Roz as well, who apparently will only show up in this revival in a guest appearance. Niles, Martin and Roz were the best characters on the show by far.
I love Roz
She might just give you a shot…
All deb needs is a Harley to rev and to make eye contact.
She’s one of my all-time favorite characters.
The Niles-Roz repartee was incomparable.
The show was honestly at it’s best when it gathered the whole bunch (including Daphne) and let them build on a theme for a while. I was thinking just yesterday of the episode ‘Death and the Dog’, where a “dog psychologist” suggests one of them is making Eddie depressed, and the five of them just get to riff on how sad their lives are for a while. It’s a great scene and plays well into each one’s individual weirdness.
Looks like Generic Sitcom #3411.3
Shaddupa you mouth!
I watched a lot of the first show as it had zero stakes and all the other actors were so good. But now there’s YouTube shorts about people walking bearded dragons on leashes.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work without Niles. But I remember hearing the same thing 30(!) years ago when people thought Frasier wouldn’t work without the gang at Cheers to bounce off of. I’m going to try and keep an open mind about it.
The best move Fraser made was to not attempt in any way to recreate the Cheers vibe. Cheers worked because its characters were all oddballs in their own ways, so following Fraser out into the world ended up about how you’d expect.
It’s like how MASH lasted so long after losing a lot of its main cast members: they didn’t try to replace like-for-like, they went in the complete opposite direction. Blake, a reluctant, completely-unmilitary draftee doctor got replaced by Potter, a career military man who came to medicine after starting in the cavalry. The womanising Trapper got replaced by the married BJ. The incompetent, wannabe social-climber Frank got replaced by true blue-blood ace surgeon Winchester.
‘M*A*S*H*’ realised that they didn’t need to replace the character, they needed to replace the role. Winchester was a completely different person to Frank (and I think would have despised him for his medical incompetence), but he played the same role as thorn in the side of Pierce.
And if the first season is well-received, you can bet your ass that they’ll shovel enough money at David Hyde Pierce to get him to relent and agree for a guest spot.
The true fans of farce are still devotedly awaiting the return engagement of Dr. Simon Finch-Royce.
Apparently they wrote a script for him, but Cleese declined, so they just created a new character to fill the void. I don’t know what episode that was, but Cleese’s episode is a stone cold classic.
I’m still waiting for the return of Frasier’s first wife, Nanny G (played amazingly by Emma Freaking Thompson). Still can’t believe she ever even guest starred on Frasier.
I think Emma Thompson didn’t come back for Frasier after doing Cheers, so they got Laurie Metcalf to do it.
The character (played by Laurie Metcalf) did appear in a Frasier episode.
Emma guest-starred as the character on Cheers – Laurie Metcalf played her in an episode of Frasier.
… and Bebe Glazer, although I guess college profs don’t need agents.
As you should.
I will admit, I did cackle a bit at the ‘top shelf’ joke. Because of course, his version of top shelf is different. I forsee a possible spit take at any bourbon served ‘jug sized’ to his palate.Myself, I like good scotch, I like bad scotch…and believe me, there are some hilariously bad scotches. But it gives me the ability to break out my best Shemp drinks something vile and then goes ‘smmmmmoooootth’ in a broken voice joke.
There’s a reason Niles is the breakout character of Frasier…
Also needs a cute dog. The dog could have been his dad’s dog that Frasier gets stucked with. I heard he hated Moose the dog that played Eddie so I can see him not wanting to have a dog in the show.
How long do you think dogs live for?
Oh man, you can really feel the David Hyde Pierce and John Mahoney shaped gap in these clips, no? I’m still rooting for this to be good, but they’re making it tough.
Frasier (the character) was never really funny. Frasier reacting to those other characters (and them reacting to him) was.The reboot, based on this trailer, looks like it’s trying to make Frasier funny by itself, which won’t work.
Yeah, it’s like the later Leslie Nielsen movies like Dracula: Dead and Loving It that missed the point that Nielsen was funny as the straight man. When you try to make him the funny one, that misses the point.
I think that’s selling the character and Grammer a little short. Frasier is plenty funny when he’s at the end of his tether (Grammer’s delivery of “AN HUNGARIAN GOOSE!” never fails to crack me up) or when he’s placed himself in some sort of excruciatingly embarrassing situation: E.g.:The schtick gets pretty tired if he doesn’t have any foils to play off of though.
What really got me in that title image is that it’s so obviously trying to recreate the sort of table scene they’d have at Café Nervosa with Toks as Roz and Nicholas as Martin. It’s a little thing, but it’s got my eye twitching.
The sad loss of John Mahoney aside, I think that the original ‘Frasier’ wrapped up the father-son story so nicely that it would be pointless to go back to it even if it were possible; Martin and Frasier really did mend their relationship and end up in a lovely place. Niles, on the other hand, no matter how much he loves his brother, would still be a great addition to the show because those two will never stop being rivals.
Hey, it’s Mary Anne from Letterkenny.
This feels a bit cringe. I’ll reserve final judgement for when it comes out because I really enjoyed the original show, but I’m not sure it’s going to work again.
I don’t feel like the question of “can Frasier exist in 2023” is a concern. You just have to have the young-in’s spar back, just like they had characters to do so in the original. More crucially, the fact that it’s not a show running indefinitely on network TV means Frasier could actually be a less terrible version of himself if they wanted to give him an arc, a la Schitt’s Creek’s characters. Not having the original dynamic is a more concerning element, since that’s hard to replace.
Frasier holds a special place in my heart, and while I’m a bit hesitant about this, I’m still going in as open-minded as possible. Definitely will miss David Hyde Pierce and John Mahoney, but the news that Peri Gilpin will be back in some capacity warms my heart.
Honestly, Peri Gilpin is the only thing that slightly captures my interest about this. Roz was a fantastic character who Gilpin played note-perfectly. I bet she can still do the role justice.
Frasier is almost always my go-to comfort food show to just throw on in the background while I’m cooking dinner or doing a little work at home. I’m very curious to see how it’ll manage without David Hyde Pierce though; as great as the whole cast was, he and John Mahoney were the MVPs.
This looks terrible.
Those tossed salads and scrambled eggs have gone bad.(Also, for any other British people here, how fucking weird is it seeing Rodney there?)
Would love it if it turns out that this entire sequel series is really just what Klaus (the freeport employee who gives the tour in Tenets) daydreams after watching Frasier reruns.
Oh wow – this isn’t half bad, what a surprise. And it has TOKS omg. She was my favorite surprise standout from “The Neighbors” which no one watched, sadly. And she’s a hell of a voice actor. I know she has done and been on lots of other things too. I adore her! Toks Olagundoye is fabulous.
She and “Larry Bird” where like the only enjoyable aspect of The Neighbors.
They got the Hick From French Lick? With Toks?I can’t believe they put a white woman on him!
So Frasier’s hanging out in a Boston bar that’s not Cheers?
What a dick.
Nobody goes there since Cliff went Q-Anon.“Little know fact. . .”
That tracks.
Sam left to go take it sleazy elsewhere.
Even worse, it looks like Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern!**They coulda rebuilt it
That also tracks.
Hell, maybe Harry the Hat (before his untimely demise) switched sides and demolished Cheers on behalf of Gary.
Does Sam even run it anymore? IRL, I’ve stopped going to bars I used to frequent when the owner retired or died because it just wasn’t the same vibe.
Well, we don’t know, do we?
I think his son was in the trailer. I just recall being overcome by blandness in a few scenes, like someone smeared oatmeal all over my screen.
“Hey, you know who we should make the focal point of our new show? The kid that appeared in 10 out of 264 episodes.”- A studio exec who gets paid way more than writers to come up with the brilliant idea of “what if Frasier but more?”
I miss the matte look of the film they used in classic Fraiser. There was a cinematic edge to the look of the show compared to most of its contemporaries. This 2.0 version looks and feels much more classic sitcom-like. The other element that made the original so unique was its use of silence. Even from its pilot there were extended moments of no dialogue, giving room for physical comedy or comedic mugging. They didn’t try to pack every minute with chatter. If you just listen to a classic episode, you pick up on the amount of silence they allowed. It really felt different.Finally, I think one of the best elements of Fraiser 1.0 was its focus on its namesake’s inability to live the advice he regularly doled out. It made for a deeply imperfect central character.Toughest of all is the lack of Niles and Fraiser trying to out-snob each other.
That’s one of the ways they totally missed the mark.Frasier (the show) was, for lack of a better word, classy. Light musical opening, simple line drawing of the the Seattle skyline, with just a liiiitle bit of flare. Silent, white on black title cards. Beautifully dressed sets.It was cool and breezy. A supreme confidence in itself, much like making jokes that 90% of the audience won’t get, but knowing that the 10% who do will love the show that much more.This looks like it could’ve been made alongside How I Met Your Mother in 2005.And while I know they’d never get Laura Linney onto this show, it’s very existence makes the hopeful, wonderful series finale into a retroactive bummer. Turns out Frasier failed at love yet again.
Eh, I’m with you overall, but I disagree that the humor, itself, was particularly highbrow. Sure, Frasier and Niles frequently reference highbrow things, but the audience doesn’t really have to understand what Die Fledermaus is in order to laugh along with Martin at the Crane boys’ snootiness. Heck, most of the humor is straight-up farce—which, don’t get me wrong, you have to be very smart to pull off a good farce, but it’s the sort of humor that everyone can appreciate.
Oh, it’s definitely not all that highbrow, but there were jokes that went over most people’s heads sometimes.They were really good at farce though. “The Ski Lodge” is brilliant.
“I’m not gay, Guy!”There’s another great gag in a later season where the episode begins in medias farce with Marty strutting into the room as an Italian count.
And also the radio play!Set up:Has only one line.Is dyslexic.Pay off:“Look out! He’s got a nug!”
I always thought the secret sauce in ‘Frasier’ was finding the perfect blend of high and low brow humour, as epitomised by the line, “Golda Meir! Golda my ass!”
“What, ‘sosphisticated’? ‘Cultured’? Is that why you think I won’t fit with your snooty, A-list friends?! I’m not genteel enough?!”“Oh, now, Roz-”“‘Now Roz’, my ass! I’m just as refined as you are shut up, Niles.”
Seriously, what I love so much about Frasier is as I have grown and learned more into my middle years, I find myself understanding random jokes on Frasier that I missed on a previous viewing.A life goal should be to get every single reference doled out across all eleven seasons.
I’ll give them this much: adult-Freddy is well-cast. He looks enough like the kid who played him that at first I thought it was the kid grown up.I’ll give this a shot, in spite of some serious doubts. It looks like it could be a misfire, but maybe not so badly off as some recent ones (Murphy Brown comes to mind).It’s interesting that Frasier has his own place. The natural starting point to me would be for him to be forced to move into his son’s place, which he hates, except for one designer chair that Freddy lets him keep. And maybe Freddy has a dog that jumps on Frasier’s lap all the time.
This trailer made me say aloud, “Didn’t CBS learn anything from the Murphy Brown revival???”
The new Freddy looks a little too bland for me. I like how the original Freddy (well, I think the longest tenured one was the third original Freddy, technically) was kind of funny-looking, as one would expect from the son of Frasier and Lilith. As far as I know Trevor Einhorn is still a working actor; losing out on the revival role must have been a bit of a blow.
One of your questions should have been WHY is this being made, or FOR WHOM.Fraser coming back and living with his son who doesn’t want him around anymore is exactly how the rest of us feel, and they made a whole damn revival around it.
This looks like a very iffy proposition, but on the other hand, Toks. Always good to see her in things.
Paramount+ was apparently created to reconstruct my childhood television viewing habits to diminishing returns. Ahh, to be a white male in his 40’s today …
I still prefer Rob Long’s pitch, which was that Frasier and Niles buy Cheers. Freddie was also to be a major character in that version (with father-son at odds, like they are here.)A hybrid between Frasier and Cheers with characters from both.Oh, well…..
Freers? Chasier?
Freers, hands down.
Chaser!
Frajure.
He should know. He’s Frajer.
I didn’t expect the laugh track. Those are dead people laughing – did you know that?
Anyone else tired of the generation that have us reaction videos on YouTube, whining about laughtracks?You know who gets influenced by other people laughing. The exact same type of weak-minded person who buys 100% into the idea that laughtracks = bad show… sheep.
It’s ok that you didn’t get the reference, but the breathless nonsense response was a little weird.
No, it’s mainly you who cares. Best of luck with that.
Nicholas Lyndhurst? What a plonker!
It’s silly, but as a native Washingtonian I’m a little annoyed the revival won’t still be set in Seattle. Not the Frasier particularly got Seattle—true Seattleites would dress down between work and attending the opera—but it was nice to have some representation.
I haven’t a clue why the made Freddie into a fireman of all things. They should have made Freddie grow up into a tightly wound fussbucket academic and have his dad, still a pretentious fool but also wiser after his years with Martin, be around to play off him. Then you still get a Frasier-Niles dynamic, but through a father-son relationship instead of a sibling one.Instead, Freddie is Martin in the revival.And again, Freddie. Brilliant (once goth) Freddie. Is. A. Fireman.
I loved Goth Freddie.
That certainly would have worked. Freddy as the new Niles, and Frasier as kind of a more hybrid Cheers-era Frasier and Martin. I mean, they seem to have forgotten that by the end of Cheers, Frasier really was one of the guys.
I interpreted it more as the character falling back into his old habits once he started hanging around with his even snootier brother again.
They have Anthony LaPaglia just waiting beneath some “break-in-case-of-emergency” glass.
I just can’t.
How did nerdy little Freddy, who was just as stuffy as Frasier and Lilith and Niles as a child, become a guy’s guy fireman who drinks beer and gets his Scotch in plastic bottles, is the biggest question for me.
Here’s a Frasier follow-up I did three years ago, where it’s about the characters Freddy, David, and Alice, with a cameo from Niles. It’s also set in Boston.
Marge Madness likes to toss my salad
so the porn parody is called “Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs”?