Kelsey Grammer has revealed the Cheers castmate that he’d like to appear in the reboot of his hit sitcom, Frasier.
The 68-year-old actor and producer returned to screens in 2023 as his best-known character, the highly-strung psychiatrist Frasier Crane.
Though Frasier was initially introduced to audiences in season three of the Boston-based comedy Cheers, the character was developed further in the eponymous spin-off series that ran from 1993 to 2004.
Now that Frasier has been revived, Grammar has named Frasier’s Cheers ex-girlfriend Diane Chambers as a character he’d like to see back on screen.
Speaking to Kelly Clarkson on her talk show on Tuesday (9 January), Grammer revealed how much Diane impacted Frasier’s character.
“When I first got the role, the key to Frasier for me was that he loved her with his whole heart, that he loved with all of his being. And that actually defined who he is,” he said.
Kelsey Grammer in ‘Frasier’— (NBC)
“He’s been that way ever since. He just goes in wholeheartedly with everything – and that’s what makes him funny.”
Played by Shelley Long, Diane was a pretentious graduate student who worked at the bar as a waitress. Frasier was introduced to the show as a love interest for her, secondary to her on-off romance with Sam (Ted Danson).
Grammer added that Diane’s return would give Frasier a chance to “put something to bed” with her and could “end up with a nice thing between them”.
Kelsey Grammer and Shelley Long in ‘Frasier’— (NBCUniversal/Getty)
Long appeared in the original Frasier series in the season three episode, “The Show Where Diane Comes Back”.
Several key players in the original Frasier series do not appear in the revival, including David Hyde Pierce, who played Frasier’s brother, Niles, and Jane Leeves, who played Daphne Moon, a Mancunian physical therapist and Niles’s eventual wife.
John Mahoney, who played Frasier and Niles’s father Martin, died in 2018.
The Frasier reboot, which launched last year, follows Frasier as he returns to Boston after decades of living in Seattle and begins teaching at his alma mater, Harvard University.
Speaking about the development of the reboot in October, the showrunners Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris revealed that they had originally planned for the new series to focus on Frasier and Niles running a theatre together.
“For a long time, the idea was that Frasier and Niles were going to run a black-box theatre, like how they bought that restaurant and brought it back to life [in the season two episode ‘The Innkeepers’],” said Cristalli.
“But it’s hard for Frasier and Niles to run the theatre when you don’t have Niles, so we had to step back from that.”
Frasier is available to stream on Paramount+ now. You can read The Independent’s review of the rebooted series here.
