The Frasier reboot almost had me for a minute

season 2 episodes 6-10

Previous Frasier posts: season one part one, season one part two, season two part one

Whew, I was getting worried for a moment there folks. The first three episodes we’re covering today all maintained a basic level of competence and got a few laughs from me. Was I losing my edge? Were my standards eroding as I came to accept this is the best that can be hoped for anymore? Don’t worry, the next two were total stinkers that affirmed me in my critical faculties and belief that this show deserves all the catty comments I’ve committed to making about it. Before we get started two general thoughts that are rattling around in my brain. 

First: The Frasier reboot has no idea how to do character spotlight episodes. This failing stands out in contrast to two other shows I’m watching right now, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Neon Genesis Evangelion¹. Most episodes of DS9 focus on a specific character and push the others to varying degrees of the background; you can tell in the first five minutes whether it will be a Quark episode, an Odo episode, a Kira episode (god forbid). Evangelion is even more impressive because most every episode features the entire ensemble but each one is so carefully constructed to leave no doubt who the star is. Frasier (2023) just can’t do it. Every episode is a mushy ensemble affair where no one takes center stage. It’s this unwillingness to make choices about who to focus on that leaves every actor feeling underserved and every character underdeveloped. 

Speaking of not making choices, I still can’t get over what a missed opportunity the David character is. Think of what multifaceted characters Niles and Daphne are, think of how you could mix and evolve their traits, and the best they could come up with was Generic Goober With Allergies? Here’s an idea—Daphne was a woo-woo lady who thought she was psychic; Niles was a Jungian clinician, which the writers put in to contrast with Frasier’s staunch Freudianism without, I think, really thinking through that Jung was a mystical weirdo. But let’s take it seriously—what if David, raised in that intellectual stew, was hyper-adept with psychoanalytic theory and also totally into the paranormal, comfortable jumping from Civilization and Its Discontents to Mesmerism to the Death Drive to Atlantean spirit possession without taking a breath? I just came up with that! You know how no matter who was credited on a 30 Rock script it was Donald Glover writing Kenneth? Just do that with David but it’s Patrick Blanchfield in the writers room. 

Anyway let’s get into the episodes. If you need the character list consult the previous posts linked above because I don’t feel like writing new jokes for each of them right now. 

Episode 6: “Cape Cod”

Synopsis: Eve is dipping her toes back into dating so Frasier decides it’s time to get her together with Freddy. He’s already rented a house on Cape Cod for a long weekend with them along with Roz and her daughter Alice (played by Grammer’s daughter Greer Grammer) so that will be the perfect romantic spot to play matchmaker. When Freddy and Eve arrive (with David in tow) and see his lavish outlay of flowers and Champagne they assume Frasier has planned the weekend to try to make a move on Roz. It’s evident to them that they have to stop him—for Freddy because doesn’t want his dad to ruin one of his oldest friendships and for Eve because she thinks they’re cousins. Alice arrives, panicking Frasier because she’s pretty and could distract Freddy from Eve. David instantly falls in love with Alice. Roz has a conversation with Eve to see if she’s open to a serious relationship while Freddy tries euphemistically to suggest to his dad not to pursue Roz. The situation reverses—now the kids are trying to get Roz and Frasier together while the adults try to prevent anything from going down between Freddy and Eve. No one hooks up and it all works out in the end.

Thoughts: First of all, what a lazy title—“Cod Caper” was right there! But anyway this episode is basically fine so I don’t need to belabor what worked or not. Instead I have two thoughts. 

The first is that a good sitcom set is distinguished by having lots of distinct zones. Frasier’s apartment in the original series is a great example of this. On first glance it appears as a large undivided space but it’s actually expertly designed to break down into smaller spaces during party scenes. There’s the kitchen, obviously the most separate space, but also the balcony, and the couch area, the Sherry Shelf, over by the front door. It’s so crucial for the comedy for it to be possible to sequester characters in different areas so that miscommunications and shenanigans can occur. Frasier’s apartment in the reboot is so much inferior: it’s just a flat rectangle with no depth. The staging can only place characters somewhere left-to-right. It never feels like they’re far enough from each other for different storylines to be happening without everyone being aware. The point here is that the Cape Cod house is basically all nooks and niches for characters to conspire in; I wish it were the show’s main set. 

Second thought: Sorry to go all sex-scenes-in-movies-discourse, but the revival of a show from the 90s throws into relief a certain sort of prudishness that’s come to dominate in the intervening years. Like, a lot of Original Frasier is about his sex life! It usually ends in humiliation and failure but the audience is supposed to be rooting for him. He has a shot with all these beautiful women and it’s funny but also a shame that he can never seal the deal. By contrast, in this episode there are three potential romantic/sexual pairings and we’re supposed to be rooting against all three! We are put in the position of thinking it best that no one have sex! Now with Frasier and Roz, I do agree, they should not be a couple and the late season episodes of the original show where they hooked up are bad and misguided. But Freddy and Eve? Like why not? They’re young and hot and have chemistry! The authorial stance against the possibility is so clear in this episode that it made me notice that it’s the case throughout the show generally; dating is such a sitcom staple premise (and an obvious way to bring in guest stars) that its total absence from this show is striking and partially accounts for why it often seems to be at a loss for storylines and just sort of casting about, wondering what people do with their lives.

Literary References: Roz: “What is that music?” Frasier: “Those are the loin-stirring arpeggios of one Felix Mendelssohn, aka the ultimate get it on music”

Joke of the Week: [Frasier outlining matchmaking plan]: Roz: “Aw, you seem so excited. I’m going to wait for it all to blow up before I tell you how stupid it is.”

Grade: B+

Episode 7 : “My Brilliant Sister”

Synopsis: It’s the day of the Harvard vs Yale baseball(?) classic! Olivia’s sister Monica (Yvette Nicole Brown), a successful professor at Yale, is in town for the game and to one-up her at every turn. Frasier is hosting a “tailgate” for the game at his house which might be attended by Nobel prize winner Valdo Kottnik (sp?), Estonia’s finest author and famed recluse. But oh no!, no one knows what he looks like! Olivia has made up a fake boyfriend to impress her sister so Eve enlists one of her actor friends to pose as “Mark,” who gets deep into character. David misidentifies “Mark” as Valdo causing Frasier to waste the party talking to him; Olivia and the real Valdo hit it off and end up making out in Frasier’s kitchen. 

Thoughts: Finally an episode that isn’t just imitating classic sitcom setups but actually having fun with them. This is the most self-aware the show has been, as when Freddy brainstorms how his dad’s party could go awry this time and when Alan suggests Frasier pretend to be his own twin; the writers toe the line just right in acknowledging the datedness of the form without passing into the sort of “so that happened” territory everyone hates. 

Structurally, this episode also fires on all cylinders. After a first scene at the bar, the rest of the episode takes place at the party. It’s genuinely impressive how well it handles the cast, moving them on- and off-stage as needed and reshuffling who’s interacting with who. The Olivia story and the Valdo story run parallel to each other but intersect frequently—honestly really deft story construction. 

That being said, the Monica character is basically a dud and Yvette Nicole Brown is just doing Shirley from Community but with a Ph.D. She gets a big moment at the very end of the episode that totally fails and brings down an episode that had multiple actual laugh lines for me. 

Literary References: Eve’s softball team of actors is called A Midsummer Night’s Team; the shortstop catches the ball and stops to consider it like Yorick’s skull. 

Frasier namechecks Pynchon and Salinger to establish that Valdo is a recluse. Valdo’s work is characterized as part childhood memoir, part travelogue; his closest analogue feels like Sebald, maybe?

Monica models “linguistic patterns as they pertain to Heideggerian modalities.” I don’t think “Heideggerian modalities” is a real term or thing. 

Hack Joke of the Week: David, trying to identify Valdo: “Excuse me, have you ever written a memoir that explores the depths of childhood trauma and despair?” The ten or twelve surrounding guests: “Yes!”

Not a Fact Check: Frasier tells Olivia he also has a sibling who went to Yale. I immediately paused the episode to note this FACTUAL ERROR because I was sure that, like Frasier, Niles went to Harvard. But I’m wrong. According to the Wikipedia page for Niles (lol) it’s established in season 1 episode 15 that Niles is a Yalie. Also, I love that this paragraph exists:

Grade: B-

Episode 8: “Thank You, Dr. Crane”

Synopsis: Frasier, Freddy, and Roz return to Seattle to record a radio special for KACL, which means it’s cameo time! Bulldog (Dan Butler) is here! Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert) is here! Noel died on the way back to his incel home planet! Frasier meets with a man who called in to his show years ago; he says Frasier changed his life by telling him to follow his dreams. But oh no! He did so by quitting his lawyer job to become a magician—and he sucks at magic! Further meddling from Frasier brings him to the brink of a complete breakdown. In the B-plot, David quits being Alan’s assistant and becomes Olivia’s but ends up back with Alan. 

Thoughts: This episode is ruined by the tyranny of story. The appeal of the Reunion Episode is, obviously, hanging out with some old pals. But Bulldog and Gil only get a couple of minutes of screen time before we turn to the story of the failed magician, which veers into the misanthropic territory we expect from the HIMYM team of just laughing at this guy for being a loser. It made me feel bad. Why must we have such a capital-P Plot? What’s frustrating is there’s a kernel of an idea about how KACL has gone downhill over the years—it would have been more interesting to focus on that and just spend some time with Bulldog and Gil and hear more from them reflecting on their lives and careers twenty years since we last saw them. 

Literary References: When Frasier tells Roz she should leave KACL and move to the east coast he quotes Thomas Wolfe, “in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future.” This passage comes from You Can’t Go Home Again. Thematic??

Hack Joke of the Week: Frasier: “I have to help that man, after all my name stands for something in this town.” Barista: “Latte for Frojurt?”

Frasier Lore: Niles and Daphne moved to Sedona, now own a vineyard (David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves really don’t want to be in this huh?). Niles drives a Tesla, yuck. Bulldog is gay now and Martin’s old bar, McGinty’s, is a gay bar. 

Grade: C

Episode 9: “Murder Most Finch”

Synopsis: Frasier finally has a date! It’s with Holly (Patricia Heaton), the opera house bartender from the Cyrano episode. She’s a salt of the earth type so Frasier is at pains to hide his pretentious side. For their second date they go to a thing at Olivia’s house, which is secretly a full costume murder mystery party. Frasier assumes Holly will think this is so lame it will end their relationship so he’s trying desperately to get them out of there. The lights go off and when they come on again, someone has knocked over the giant dollhouse that’s a clue to the mystery. Olivia is devastated—someone has [groan] murdered her murder mystery party. Frasier is the suspect, now he must catch the culprit and solve The Mystery of the Murder Mystery Murder to clear his name. 

Thoughts: 31 minutes??? As Vince Mancini wrote recently, the shows are too damned long, and not even the sitcoms are safe!

Anyway, this episode sucks. The writers of this show seem like the most miserable fucks on the planet—it’s crazy how much of it is characters hating the situation they’re in, refusing to play along, suppressing even a hint of enthusiasm. A great comic situation is one where it feels like it’s barreling along, gaining momentum until the characters are scrambling to keep up, but so frequently here the writing actively fights this feeling with characters who refuse to buy in and deflate the energy at every turn. In this case, every character acts like playing their roles for Olivia’s party is literally torture, both mortifying and boring unto death. Even after the dollhouse is smashed, there’s still this constant undercutting where characters just keep saying god this is so stupid, I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my time and so on. I found myself thinking the same things!!

Literary References: Eve wonders, is the dollhouse clue a reference to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House? 

Alan did his thesis on “the doyenne of British crime fiction Dorothy L. Sayres.” Sorry, what? Alan is a psychology professor so I would assume his doctoral thesis was, you know, on psychology. Was he a lit major in undergrad and we’re calling a senior essay a thesis now?

Hack Joke of the Week: [At the hockey game for their first date] Frasier: “The last time I saw a puck this frantic it was my brother Niles in his junior high production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  

Olivia’s Books: We get several good shots of Olivia’s bookshelves so I’m immediately pausing and trying to see what titles I can pick out. There are a few selections that speak to the kind of sophisticated taste Olivia supposedly has like Huck Finn and Emma, but it’s mostly a very random and very funny hodgepodge airport thrillers, Nicholas Sparks-esque titles, and pop psych nonsense. 

Gotta call out both John Madden’s autobiography and one of Marcia Clark’s (from the OJ trial) thrillers. Great stuff.

On the left, there’s a copy of Down and Dirty Pictures, which is a book about Miramax, Sundance, and the rise of indie film in the 90s that my dad once gave me a copy of but I never read (sorry Dad). Also the late, highly reactionary Michael Crichton novel State of Fear, which is about how climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the scientific establishment; I read it as a teen and it was the book that taught me that works of art can “have politics” and those politics can be very bad!

Call out any other funny books you notice in the comments.

Grade: D

Episode 10: “Father Christmas”

Synopsis: A subplot I’ve neglected to mention is that Alan is estranged from his oldest daughter Nora (Rayne Bidder) and is extra sad about it now that she has had a baby. She’s in town for Christmas so Frasier hatches a plan to reconcile them. When they do meet face to face, Nora tells him to stop calling, stop trying, because she will not have him in her life. Freddy thinks about the rocky relationship he had with his dad and is moved to try again with Nora, to give her and Alan the second chance he’s had with Frasier, telling her that he forgave him because he realized that by holding onto his anger he was hurting himself as well. She rebuffs him in the moment but later turns up at Frasier’s Christmas Eve soiree with her baby daughter. Alan holds his granddaughter and all is well, Merry Christmas. 

Thoughts: I cannot tell you how much I was dreading an attempt at earnest and emotional storytelling from this writing team. I’m happy to say they mostly pulled it off, thanks in large part to great work from the cast. Lyndhurst is genuinely good playing Alan’s serious side but Cutmore-Scott is the MVP of this episode. The moment when Freddy hears Frasier say he wanted to give Nora and Alan a second chance and wordlessly decides to go talk to her again is a really well-executed character beat, and then his conversation with her is well-written and well acted too. 

The writing overall is more insightful and willing to put itself out there emotionally. Lyndhurst’s best moment is when Holly tells him she lied to get out of Frasier’s invite because an intimate Christmas Eve dinner is “just too much.” Alan: “Well that’s Frasier: too much. Too impulsive, too grandiose, too romantic. And too in love with big, ill-fated grand gestures. But, I can tell you, that nobody loves with a bigger heart than Frasier Crane. You just have to decide if that’s what you want.” I really like this; “too much” is not a way I would think to describe Frasier but it’s absolutely true. 

I do have problems with this episode though. Almost every one of these earnest moments gets immediately undercut by some joke meant to alleviate the tension so the audience doesn’t have to sit with a genuine emotion. They are all really bad. There’s also a B-plot about David getting way too into making a gingerbread village and imagining an entire world and backstory for it. The joke, as always, is that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. It sucks so bad. 

Literary References: Alan mounts a defense of Ebenezer Scrooge as “a frugal realist” and one of the most misunderstood heroes in English literature. Olivia has bought Freud’s humidor as a Christmas gift for Frasier. 

Another Thing: There’s a building in David’s Victorian gingerbread village that has a giant sign on the roof that reads “GIRLS.” Gingerbread strip club??? 

Grade: B

1. Read my pal BDM’s great revisit series that got me watching (and hopelessly obsessed).