The reboot, which picks up two decades later, is more of a pleasant throwback than a reinvention, and that seems to be the point. This new series does its best to echo the old, including replacing missing characters with facsimiles.
Frasier is back in Boston, where he was an unlikely Cheers bar regular before getting his own spinoff series. Mahoney died in 2018, so filling in for the working-class man is Frasier’s son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who has dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter, like the salt of the earth. I had skipped a generation. .
Hyde Pierce opted out of the reboot, but Niles’ son David is in instead. He’s played by Anders Keith, a newcomer with expert comic timing, who livens up every scene he’s in. He makes David a delightful echo of Niles, as a nervous, socially inept Harvard student, almost as bombastic in his speech as his uncle.
But with the exception of David, the new characters never come out. There’s a Cheers-like bar where Frasier hangs out with his old Oxford classmate Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst), a Harvard psychology professor who loves Scotch and hates work. They also meet there with Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the ambitious head of the university’s psychology department. She is desperate to recruit Frasier, who in the years between series has become rich and famous doing a television version of his old radio show; this fictional Harvard is relentlessly stupid. And Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro) is a waitress at the same bar (really, Boston isn’t that small) and vaguely echoes the brainy Carla from Cheers.
Grammer, as always, has impeccably sharp delivery and timing, and the show pokes fun at Frasier’s elitism. In a pompous tone, he tells the sleep-deprived mother of a crying baby, “Cherish these times. They disappear with cruel rapidity,” only to find that the sound of his voice lulls the baby to sleep. It’s fun once. That the joke is repeated gives Frasier its crunchy sitcom feel. The reboot is full of such obvious tropes.
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