Today’s television, like many of its consumers, thrives on nostalgia. Reboots or sequels intended to update classic series are commonplace: Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Roseanne and Murphy Brown have produced modernizations in recent years that have one thing in common: they are all melancholic – and sometimes a little pathetic – repeats of their originals from the 1990s, remembered more in the signifier than in the meaning. Frasier is the last body to leave the cryogenic chamber. Kelsey Grammer returns to play the campy and lovable psychiatrist, undoubtedly the role of a lifetime – with the permission of supporting actor Bob, whom he has portrayed on The Simpsons since 1990 – although everything else has changed.
The original series took place in a Seattle without grunge. The reboot, just released by SkyShowtime, returns to where it all began: Boston, where the character of Frasier appeared as a member of the large cast of Cheers in the ’80s. There the protagonist meets his son Freddy, who accuses him of being a bad father. To make up for his past mistakes, Frasier takes a job at Harvard, buys the building where his son lives, and forces him to live with him. As if there was no other way to demonstrate his love than to share living space with this thirty-something son – a strange solution that came from an expert on the Oedipus complex.
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To modernize the series, Freddy could have been a young, bright man who questioned his father’s privileges, his incorrigible snobbery, and his apparent apoliticism. The new Frasier’s bet is much more conservative: a lazy conflict between the pompous psychiatrist and his vulgar-inclined son, who gave up his studies at Harvard to become a firefighter (in a stunning leap of continuity, fans of the original Will). Remember, when we last saw Freddy, he was a goth teenager with few friends and lots of allergies. The aim is to recreate Frasier’s conflict with his own father, the masterful John Mahoney, who died in 2018, even if the result is far from the original. Neither do Niles and Daphne, and it’s undeniable that they’ll be missed (Roz and Lilith, Frasier’s ice-cold ex, will appear as guests this season).
Nicholas Lyndhurst and Kelsey Grammer, in the first episode of Frasier’s return. Chris Haston/Paramount+
The first Frasier was full of extravagances that made it a unique product in television at the time and defied all Aristotelian rules: the playful intertitles, the very strange song in the credits, the absent figure of Maris, the dissident masculinity of its protagonists, the audacity, Frasier seen sleeping with Freud during a wet dream. Aside from the canned laughs, this sequel retains almost nothing from the original, which isn’t a disaster so much as a tasteless disappointment. Only Grammer saves them with a bombshell charm (he even manages to make us forget that he voted for Donald Trump), although his excessive prominence contradicts the choral magic of the first part.
If the young characters are disastrous, the protagonist’s new classmates at Harvard are more interesting: a professor and friend from his youth, all British phlegms (the veteran Nicholas Lyndhurst), and Frasier’s new boss, played by the Nigerian Toks Olagundoye, who distances him from the series Nuclear target that characterized it in the 1990s. In a party sequence at the university, the three star in a convoluted farce that, if we’re being a little generous, is reminiscent of the jokes so plentiful in the original series, including Latin jokes.
It comes in the fifth episode, the last we could see, as we begin to discover the vulnerability of these new characters, one of the keys to the success of the first series: the inevitable bond caused by their ridiculousness, their… paradoxes and their traumas. In fact, the first episodes of “Frasier” in the 1990s weren’t glorious, but that didn’t stop the following eleven seasons from making television history. Maybe we should give this rearguard sitcom a little more time. The question is whether the platform can do that.
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