‘Frasier’ TV Review: Revival Finds Kelsey Grammer’s Snobby Shrink Back Like He Never Left
09.10.2023 - 13:27
/ deadline.com
Frasier is back.
Actually, Dr. Frasier Crane is so unobtrusively back in the Paramount+ revival debuting on October 12 that it’s truly as if Kelsey Grammer’s pompous and often hilarious psychiatrist character never left — truly.
In an industry awash with alternative timelines as plot points almost as much as it is with creatively barren reboots and reunions, perhaps it would be better to peg the Frasier revival not as something new at all, but neither something old. Perhaps a more crystalline perspective would be to view this Frasier as simply the charmingly chugging along 30th season of the beloved and acclaimed Cheers spinoff.
While clearly a subscriber lunge for Paramount+ in this age of streamer contractions, this 10-episode revival is indeed so blatantly a throwback to a very different era of television that to try to taint it as mere nostalgia is to miss the point. A little thinner on top, a little meatier around the middle, and sometimes a bit slower in its sitcom delivery, Frasier 3.0 emerges eternally itself in an ever changing world and media landscape.
From the too loud studio audience laughs, the staging, the set-ups and timing, the lighting, the improbabilities, the in-jokes (Yes, we are listening), and most of the conundrums and tropes the 2023 narrative employs, Frasier the revival strength is being exactly what you would expect if Frasier had never ended in the first place in 2004 after 11 seasons.
Of course, Frasier did end almost 20 years ago and time kept moving on, in the real world and on the small screen.
To that end, a bona fide celebrity now, Grammer’s vainglorious Frasier moves with a stiffness he never had before. Yet, for a man of 68, he can still fumble the most straightforward of emotional