Review: ‘Frasier’ Returns, Tossed, Scrambled and Eggscruciating

“Frasier” always saw itself as something more than a mere plebeian sitcom. It delighted in Noel Coward-esque banter. Its protagonist, the radio psychiatrist Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), closed his final broadcast reciting Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”

So let me begin my thoughts on “Frasier,” the Paramount+ revival of the long-running “Cheers” sequel, with words that its leading man of letters might attend to, from the poem “Terminus,” by his fellow Harvard man Ralph Waldo Emerson:

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!”

Alas, “No more!” is not a phrase in the streaming TV industry’s vocabulary. On Thursday, Frasier Crane becomes the latest classic character to set sail for a mediocre, anticlimactic return, the god of bounds be damned.

When last we saw Frasier, he had passed up a chance at TV stardom and left Seattle for Chicago to be with his new love, Charlotte (Laura Linney). The new “Frasier,” developed by Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli, dispenses with that inconvenient narrative closure in about ten seconds of exposition. Frasier landed a TV show after all — he recently quit it after many years — and Charlotte has dumped him. (At least the premiere doesn’t Etch-a-Sketch the no-longer-a-finale quite as brazenly as the “Will and Grace” and “Roseanne” revivals.)

Single again, loaded with TV money and having just buried his father, Martin (John Mahoney, who died in 2018), he’s off for a sojourn in Paris. But he makes a pit stop in Boston to reconnect with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who disappointed Frasier by dropping out of Harvard and becoming a firefighter. (His choice may also surprise the audience, who might recall him as an awkward chess nerd going through a goth phase, but hey, people change.)

Freddy, who resents Frasier’s dismissal of his work, isn’t eager for the reunion, but the inexorable logic of sitcom revivals kicks in. While Paramount+ has declared some twists of the first episode — none of them surprising — to be spoilers, suffice it to say that Frasier cancels his Paris plans, has a Harvard teaching gig fall into his lap and ends up spending a lot of quality time with his estranged son.

If you are scanning this review for familiar names besides Grammer’s, I have some bad news. Beyond some reportedly upcoming guest appearances, the new “Frasier” joins “Night Court” as a revival that surrounds one returning lead with new sidekicks who, if you squint, might pass for versions of the old gang.

So Freddy is Freddy, but he’s also a version of Martin, the down-to-earth ex-police officer who took the air out of Frasier’s swelled head. As David, the son of Frasier’s brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) and his wife Daphne (Jane Leeves), Anders Keith channels the absent Hyde Pierce, right down to pronouncing the word “Sahara” the way Sting does.

Well, he’s half a Niles; Nicholas Lyndhurst, as Frasier’s old college chum and new faculty colleague Alan, supplies the other half, playing Frasier’s erudite contemporary. Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro) is sort of a Daphne. Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the department head who recruits Frasier to teach, is sort of a Roz.

And “Frasier” is … sort of “Frasier.” It is also, returning to Boston, sort of “Cheers.” The callbacks flow like drafts at happy hour. Frasier says that the last time he lived in the city, “I may have spent too much time at a certain bar.” And his run-in with a firehouse Dalmatian sets up a callback to his canine frenemy, Eddie: “I outlasted that little mongrel. I’ll outlast you.”

The result is something that feels less like Season 12 of “Frasier” or Season 1 of a new series than a sort of museum of itself — be sure to visit the gift shop! — weighed down with knickknacks and nostalgia.

Frasier Crane, of course, has a lot of history even by sitcom-revival standards. He first appeared on TV nearly four decades ago, as the stuffed-shirt romantic rival to Sam Malone (Ted Danson) on “Cheers.” The 1993 premiere of “Frasier” mellowed him out and put him in his own element. The lead-character version of Frasier was haughty but soulful.

You can’t say Grammer doesn’t know Frasier after all these years. He falls into the old bluster as if he’d time-traveled straight from 2004, and his new staff writes in the character’s voice well enough. (It did stop me in the first episode when he references “the hoi polloi”; surely the purist polymath Frasier would hold that “the” is redundant since “hoi” is a definite article.) The show even returns the formidable sitcom director James Burrows to shoot the first two episodes, which both premiere on Thursday.

But it has the purgatorial feel of a sitcom that returned without a purpose beyond “More of that guy I like, please.” The central father-son dynamic feels forced rather than rooted in history, and Freddy is a nonentity, undefined as a character except in relation to his meddling dad.

You could forgive the lack of ideas if there were at least a few laughs. But this reproduction has the predictable beats of a mothballed 20th-century sitcom. If there is a baby seat that plays “Baby Shark” when someone bumps into it, you know that someone will bump into it again. And again.

The third episode, the best of the five screened for critics, at least gives Frasier a new conflict while meta-commenting on the revival. As he prepares to teach his first class, he realizes that his students, and his colleagues, are looking not for a professor but a celebrity, wanting him to re-create his shtick from his talk show. But he’s embarrassed of those years; in a series of clips, we see that he went from giving sober advice in the first season to, by Season 13, wearing a football-referee uniform and doing ax-throwing stunts.

Now that I would watch! No, not the cheesy advice program that Frasier sold himself out to do. But a show about Frasier Crane making that show, lowering himself to win the love of hoi polloi, moving outside his comfort zone, finding out that success is a kind of prison — I would hit “play all” on that. It might be great, it might be terrible, but it would be interesting. But the revival industry is not in the business of interesting.

As I’ve written before, there’s an inherent sadness to bringing back a sitcom after years or decades, the twinge of time passing. You can treat that melancholy in different ways, even get laughs out of it, but to ignore it just rings false. While this “Frasier” has the occasional sentimental moment, it’s too busy re-creating the past to engage with the past. It re-tosses the salads, it re-scrambles the eggs. But it has no desire to hear the blues a-callin’.