Frasier

When I was a kid we didn’t watch sitcoms, though I have early memories of my dad watching Cheers for a while. It wasn’t until I was out of college that I explored the big three TV comedies of the 1990s: Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier. Of the three, the trials of tribulations of Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) have always been, for my money, the most entertaining. The show, which ran for 11 seasons, combines farce, slapstick, witty repartee, and heart. Usually in perfect balance.

Almost two decades later, the show was revived for Paramount+ and is in its second season. After leaving talk radio, Frasier moved to daytime television and became fabulously wealthy. But after the death of his father, Martin (the late John Mahoney), he decides to move back to Boston to reconnect with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott). Never one to rest on his laurels, Frasier accepts an adjunct teaching position at Harvard with his old friend Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst).

Freddy dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter and is totally unlike the brainiac kid we remember from the original show (though this is addressed). At first he’s living with Eve (Jess Salgueiro), the wife of his late best friend, to help take care of her baby. But after Frasier buys their building (!) to get the apartment across the hall, Freddy moves in with him. The show is hardly subtle in its symmetry.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, Frasier finds that Alan is a slacker and a lush, coasting on tenure, much to the frustration of the psychology department head, Olivia (Toks Olagundoye). Rounding out the core cast, Niles’ (David Hyde Pierce, who has yet to appear) neurotic son David (Anders Keith) is one of Frasier’s students. And a few familiar faces pop up along the way.

The beauty of television is that while characters age, they remain unchanged. Frasier is still the pompous fool forever humiliated by his own hubris who never learns. While Freddy and David are obvious stand-ins for Martin and Niles, respectively, the rest of the ensemble provide fresh foils for Frasier’s ambitions, with Alan’s idiocy providing many of the best laughs.

At its core, Frasier was always about fathers and sons learning to see one another as equals. There’s an argument to be made that both series are illustrations of how not to live out Paul’s advice, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (Col 3:21), second only to a pointed illustration of Solomon’s observation, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

Content wise, there’s nothing here that couldn’t have been done on network TV in 1993. If anything, the innuendos have been paired back to make room for more jokes about Frasier’s age. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the best episodes of the revival are only as good as the original’s weakest, yet this still feels like a natural continuation of Frasier’s story. So if Paramount+ is discussing another season, well, “I’m listening.” (Paramount)