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Hey baby I hear the blues a-callin’, this reboot’s a scrambled mess. Almost 20 years after Dr Frasier Crane bid a final goodnight to Seattle, the mellifluous-voiced, radio-presenting psychiatrist returns in a new series on Paramount+ that lacks all of the elevated wit and easy-going charm that saw the original run win 37 Emmys and become one of the great American sitcoms.
Revolving around a man whose intellect is eclipsed only by his pride, Frasier frequently mined humor from the character’s many pretensions and misguided ego-trips. Yet the show itself now seems to have been turned into a vanity project for actor Kelsey Grammer, who is tellingly the only member of the outstanding original ensemble to take part here (barring surprise cameos later in the series).
A star-vehicle though it may be, the revival runs like a sputtering jalopy given a new lick of paint. From the sound of the first unearned laugh from the live studio audience, the series feels less like a renewal than a relic of the past. Having left for Chicago in the 2004 “finale”, Frasier now returns to Boston — setting of Cheers, the 1980s sitcom in which he first appeared — moving back to the city to teach at Harvard.
Here he’s surrounded by ill-conceived stand-ins for those left behind. In lieu of Niles, Frasier’s fastidious, exquisitely funny, brother, is Niles’s gratingly callow son (Anders Keith, imitating David Hyde Pierce); instead of kind-hearted Mancunian carer Daphne (Niles’s great love) is a half-soused, fully caricaturish Oxonian professor (Nicholas Lyndhurst). A slightly more considered update sees his firefighter son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) take the role once occupied by his cop father, Martin, as a salt-of-the-earth foil to Frasier’s caviar-eating, sherry-swilling snob.
© Chris Haston/Paramount+
To his credit, Grammer still succeeds in marrying elitism with amiability, delivering every lofty reference and (all-too-rare) wry aside with relish. But almost every exchange with his new co-stars feels stilted, whether it’s a rigidly played back-and-forth or a forced moment of earnestness. Then again, any cast would struggle to sell a script laden with punchlines you could have seen coming from 2004. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is still when Frasier ended.
★★☆☆☆
On Paramount+ from October 14, then new episodes weekly
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