The Frasier Reboot Is A Crime Against Me Personally

The best thing I can say about the new season of Frasier is that John Mahoney didn’t live to see it. This clanging and joyless exercise in futility has nothing to offer—no interest in these characters, no understanding of the multicam sitcom as a form, and, most damning of all, no jokes. It’s an assemblage of cast-off parts from worse shows cobbled together around Kelsey Grammer, who spends every scene trying through sheer force of will to breathe life into scripts riddled with hacky gags and cliches, scripts which reveal their full soullessness when they lurch toward big emotional moments only to fall flat on their face. I expected nothing and was still disappointed.

Let’s back up. Streaming its first two episodes now on Paramount+, the Frasier reboot brings the pompous psychiatrist back to his Cheers stomping grounds of Boston as he inserts himself into his son Frederick’s life. Having lived long-distance from Freddie for essentially his entire life, he now wants to build a stronger relationship. Frasier buys Freddie’s apartment building, sets himself up in the palatial, two-floor unit across the hall, and invites him to move in with him, rent-free. Note to parents: do not do this. The setup is an overt mirroring of that of the original show, in which Frasier was obliged to let his father Martin (Mahoney) move in with him, forcing them both to confront their fraught relationship and learn to live with someone with a very different personality and lifestyle. The first episode of the reboot is titled “The Good Father;” the pilot of the original was “The Good Son.”

N.B.: I usually don’t bother italicizing the names of the works I discuss but in this case it’s necessary. When I write Frasier in italics, I mean the series which ran for eleven seasons or this new version; when I write Frasier no italics, I mean Dr. Frasier Crane the character. 

I have no problem with this premise. With David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves declining to return as Niles and Daphne and Mahoney having passed in 2018, it makes sense to situate the show around Frasier and Freddie’s relationship (Peri Gilpin and Bebe Neuwirth will apparently return as Roz and Lillith in later episodes). Freddie thus presents the first critical opportunity and danger for the writers. He appeared in eight episodes over Frasier’s run and had a well-defined character for a child, but it’s been twenty years. Who knows what adult Freddie is like? He could be anybody. For the show to succeed, the writers would have to, above all else, get this character right. They could get a lot of other things wrong but when it came to Freddie, they could not fuck it up.

Well, they fucked it up. Let’s start with the obvious, the casting. In the original series Freddie was played by Trevor Einhorn, who remains a working actor with recentish appearances in Mad Men and The Magicians (great, underwatched show btw¹). The reboot recasts the role to Jack Cutmore-Scott, an English actor with a thin list of credits and the most forgettable face I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why the powers in charge made this decision, though I have a guess², but it dooms the show from the outset. Einhorn, in addition to having a face and voice with personality, just is funny and has known how to perform on a multicam soundstage since age five. 

Cutmore-Scott does not have either of these things. Granted, the script does him *no* favors, but he is a consummate dud as a performer. He has one move in his comedic arsenal, something I call the Cheryl Hines. His reaction to every situation and everything Frasier says is to do the thing Hines does on Curb Your Enthusiasm to Larry David where she hangs her mouth open and goes, “Uhh, Larry?!” with her arms out in a half-shrug of exasperation. It is, to me, one of the least funny, least appealing things in the world and is the prime reason I have never been able to get into Curb. Cutmore-Scott does the same here, huffing and groaning through every scene without making even an attempt at being funny. He seems viscerally uncomfortable on set. Just the way he stands is wrong. 

The character as written is little better. Freddie doesn’t want Frasier in his life for… reasons? The writers—we’ll come back to them—want to ape the dynamic between Frasier and Martin from the early seasons of the original series but they don’t give Freddie enough personality to make it play. Whereas Frasier and Martin were so obviously different types of people, Freddie is just kind of a guy. He went to college but dropped out and became a firefighter—sure, fine, whatever—but he’s neither a nerd among jocks or a real, blue-collar Bostonian. He’s a blank-slate white guy—can you say “deracinated” about white people?—with no defining characteristics or interests. There’s just nothing there, so the attempt to build the show around the clash between Freddie and Frasier’s personalities is mostly confounding. Freddie comes off as a huge asshole because he’s so terribly pained by every single thing Frasier does and says and the viewer is left to wonder why. 

Part of the problem here is the way the first episode of the revival is structured around a big secret, so it becomes very muddled if Freddie wants Frasier gone because of a genuine rift between them or just in order to protect the secret. Let’s walk through this in the order it’s presented to viewers. Frasier shows up at Freddie’s apartment, where he’s living with a woman, Eve, whom Freddie introduces as his girlfriend. Frasier leaves and we learn they’re not a couple. “You haven’t told him about John?” Eve asks. John? Cue the dramatic music: is Freddie dating a man³? No, it turns out John is a baby. So wait, they’re not together but they have a kid? Frasier learns about the baby and thinks he’s a grandfather. He confronts them. No again, it turns out the baby’s father was Freddie’s firehouse buddy, who died in a fire, and Freddie is just staying with his widow to help out out of survivor’s guilt. 

These revelations unspool throughout what one might charitably call a classic Frasier dinner party scene, in which Frasier’s attempts to have a conversation with his son are thwarted by the annoying antics of the other awful supporting characters I haven’t even mentioned yet. The setup is stupid and wildly artificial, but that’s fine. The whole sitcom form is wildly artificial and the dinner party farces on the original show are little contraptions built to deliver laughs (and there are far fewer of them than you think you remember). But this first episode reeks of a writing team that jumped straight to imitating one of Frasier’s most famous forms without understanding its function. 

It’s an oft-remarked fact that on sitcoms the audience always knows what is going to happen, they just don’t know how it will happen. Niles will say something funny and swoon over Daphne and the soiree will go down in flames, but the fun is in watching the situation play out and discovering whether the disaster is due to a dead seal on the beach or some extravagant lie Frasier has told to try to get laid. The thing about a pilot episode is, definitionally, the audience does not know what to expect. To construct a sitcom pilot as a farce wrapped around a series of nested mysteries is a major unforced error. The constant misdirects and revelations make the episode feel directionless and so, so long (at 29 minutes it also just is too long). Going in with maximum goodwill and a determination to get through at any cost, I couldn’t help sighing in despair and asking over and over, where are we going with this? It doesn’t help that, again, it’s just painfully unfunny. 

The second episode features a gag where a infant rocking chair repeatedly plays “Baby Shark” at earsplitting volume and later makes the final punchline of a scene the recorded voice of an air hockey table. This is hack shit. The studio audience loves it. 

Okay let’s talk briefly about the other characters. First there’s the aforementioned Eve, played by Jess Salgueiro. I feel bad for this actress. She at least tries and is the only performer besides Grammer actually making acting choices for comedy. But the writers have saddled her with this baby and she has a very minor role in the second episode; it’s hard to imagine her character being served well in the long run. My small nitpick is she clearly has no idea how to hold the kiddo—were there no parents on this production to show her?? There’s also Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst), an psych professor at Harvard and school chum of Frasier’s, whose personality is English. That’s it! He has an English accent! He sucks! The actor is bad and has the ugliest haircut I’ve ever seen on TV. 

I take no pleasure in reporting this: they put a Sheldon in Frasier. Niles and Daphne’s son David (born in the original series finale) is attending Harvard—there’s so much Harvard talk, you guys—so he’s around as well. He is yet another iteration on a terrible character you’ve seen so many times, typified by Sheldon in Big Bang Theory—he’s awkward and gawky, sniveling and pathetic, socially incompetent and coded as on the autism spectrum, and always the butt of the joke. He’s played by newcomer Anders Keith, who has no other credits on IMDb. Among a very weak ensemble he stands out as the most disastrous. Sorry to this kid but his performance is so broad and so unfunny it’s like something from another dimension. 

The script extends no humanity to David. He exists to be laughed at and reviled, while doing jokes that were dated thirty years ago such as one about how he has a laminated card of all his allergies, the ones written in red being fatal. The very first scene of the new series involves Cornwall telling a story to Frasier and David about a kid humiliating himself on the first day of class, who—surprise—was in fact David. It’s a humiliation about a humiliation that plays so mean-spirited that I paused the episode and considered bailing right then. Bear in mind this treatment has been reserved for a character named in honor of original series co-creator David Angell, who died on September 11. 

An aside: I see Keith and Cutmore-Scott standing up there on these cut-rate sets looking utterly lost and I wonder if they’ve ever watched a multicam sitcom. Frasier and Friends both ended in 2004; The Office premiered the following year. The multicam format essentially died then, replaced by single-cam shows like 30 Rock and Community or, largely, by nothing at all. What relationship do performers their age have to the medium and its history? Do they know how these scenes are supposed to go? Can they feel the rhythm of a setup/punchline in their bones? How many episodes of Frasier have they even seen? God forbid I ask about Cheers, or All in the Family, or Mary Tyler Moore. 

That refusal to grant David his humanity extends to the other characters as well. This Frasier hates Frasier. The show treats everything he does as wrong and annoying. It can’t imagine that Frasier has good qualities, that there is something loveable and charming underneath the windbaggery and exacting decor preferences. There’s a soft misanthropy to the whole proceeding that’s profoundly dispiriting. 

Who is to blame? Reflecting on all these problems—the lazy gags, the empty characters, the lack of understanding of the genre, the meanness of it all—everything snaps into perfect clarity when you learn who was in charge behind the scenes. This reboot was developed and showrun by Chris Harris, who performed similar duties on How I Met Your Mother, without a doubt the worst successful sitcom of the new millennium—worse than Modern Family by a country mile—a cynical and manipulative piece of trash that flails through Family Guy-style cutaway gags in a desperate attempt to keep you from noticing there are no jokes and the characters are horrible. It managed to run nine seasons by gaslighting viewers into caring about its bullshit framing device only to make its fans madder than hell with a last minute finale twist that functioned as a big “fuck you” to anyone who had stuck around to the bitter end. I’ll take the overt misogyny of Two and a Half Men over HIMYM’s evil sentimentality and underlying nihilism any day. 

It’s still so wild that Neil Patrick Harris’ adult celebrity rests on playing the no-means-yes pick-up artist Barney Stinson, whose personality is best described as epic. In a way he’s the perfect avatar of the show, a dead eyed sociopath so good at blowing smoke up your ass you can convince yourself he’s a good hang.⁴

You can see the How I Met Your Mother DNA in the new Frasier so clearly. It’s most apparent in the anxious pacing of the pilot which never gives the characters or the audience a chance to breathe. Rather than introduce the new supporting players one at a time, the show insists on stuffing multiple into each scene then interrupts the basic flow of dialogue with so much bullshit that 29 long minutes later you don’t feel like you got to know any of them. The show has the stressful energy of a person trying to keep more plates spinning than they can manage. The plates all shatter. 

Furthermore, there’s an incredibly grim world-weary hopelessness to the proceedings. Because the show fails to locate the problems in Frasier’s relationship with Freddie in anything specific, it takes on a much more depressing cast of pure pointlessness. Freddie doesn’t want his dad in his life—there’s no reason for it so there’s no solving the problem. He can’t articulate his feelings or find anything in his father to relate to. It’s so sad and no one involves seems to recognize it. The first episode ends with a heart to heart⁵ between father and son but it’s not convincing. These writers don’t have a sense of warmth or human connection. Not to belabor the point but this is just like HIMYM, a show I hate.

You know what show has a great first episode? Frasier. After suffering through the reboot, I put on the original pilot from 1993. It was like sinking into a warm bath. “The Good Son” is so self-assured; the moment it begins you feel you’re in good hands. It takes its time. The first scene is Frasier at the radio station. You meet Roz and you get who she is. The scene is funny. The next scene is at Cafe Nervosa. You meet Niles and get who he is. It’s funny. The next scene you meet Martin and see how they’re going to butt heads. He’s charming, and funny. Then you meet Daphne. She’s funny. The episode feels supremely unhurried. It unwinds at precisely the pace it needs to, never worried that viewers are losing interest because it knows how damn good it is. 

And the performers! Knowing the characters as well as I do, it’s astounding to see just how fully formed they are from the outset. Pierce has all of Niles’ mannerisms nailed from frame one and brings so many small touches to the performance that make it sing. The way Leeves hits the line “I’m a little bit psychic” is why we watch sitcoms. The same is true of Grammer and Mahoney and Gilpin. They’re all so great. 

The conversations in that first episode feel thick and rich. They aren’t dense or convoluted in the slightest—they’re perfectly simple to follow in fact. There’s an inarticulable depth to them, not only sense of family history between Frasier, Niles, and Martin, but with Roz and Daphne as well. A sense of people really relating to each other, noticing and paying attention to what the other has to say on levels beyond the superficial. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s the transcendence of the banal. 

Is it too much to look at the precipitous decline from even the lesser later seasons of the original to this misbegotten streaming-only mess and see a metaphor for the last thirty years in general? All around me the world has gotten more frantic, more harried, shallower. Our social worlds have narrowed, conversational partners don’t have the patience to listen to a point or an anecdote that’s more than one sentence long. Entertainment has calcified, repeating old forms without filling in the substance, exhuming old masterpieces just to stomp on their corpse. Everything feels tedious, exhausting, the smiles on the faces having long ago twisted into grimaces. 

Frasier went back to Boston, but it doesn’t feel like home.

1. The fact that all the principle actors from The Magicians are not huge stars now is all you need to know about Hollywood’s inability to recognize and foster talent these days.

2. His obvious Jewishness. But real Frasier-heads (Listeners?) will know this is canon! Freddie is canonically Jewish through Lilith and there’s a whole episode of Frasier about his bar mitzvah!

3. His middle name is Gaylord after all. I’m so sorry.

4. Barney isn’t even the worst character on the show. That would be Lily, who can burn in Hell.

5. This is another key misunderstanding of how Frasier works. The show could do elaborate door-slamming shenanigans like “The Ski Lodge” and it could do affecting emotional character moments but it didn’t try to do both in one episode. They’re different things!