I’ll say this for the Frasier reboot: it’s not as bad as it could have been. Like most avid fans of Cheers and its first Kelsey Grammer-fronted spinoff, I’ve spent months wondering just what the new iteration would entail. Worst-case scenarios scratched at my mind like Freudian paranoias; mirthless visions of a necrotic Frasier Crane letching around Boston’s middle-aged singles scene plagued my nightmares. But we can breathe easy: the end result, which premieres on Thursday on Paramount+, is no catastrophe. It’s a functional, watchable sitcom, and Grammer is solid, if a little rusty. The series is, however, nearly entirely devoid of laughs, and – that most damning of qualities in the era of bottomless content – utterly forgettable.
Frasier (the reboot) follows Grammer’s snobby psychiatrist as he returns to his alma mater, Harvard, to take up a teaching position, while reconnecting with his firefighter son, Freddie (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and nephew David (Anders Keith). Much like the original, the series is filmed before a live studio audience, in a format referred to as a multi-camera sitcom. This is as opposed to a single-camera sitcom, such as The Office US or Modern Family. The delineation by camera is perhaps misleading; the difference usually pervades everything from dialogue, to performance, to staging. Over the past two decades, multi-camera sitcoms, once the only show in town, have been pushed to the brink of extinction. The new Frasier seems almost cluelessly dated at points, like a somehow-even-less-hip progeny of The Big Bang Theory. And yet, despite its fusty atavism, there’s something spiriting about seeing a series like this get made in 2023.
