An Open Letter to Whoever is Writing the Frasier Reboot
You're going to feel an urge to make the show about post-2016 cultural stuff. Please don't.
I wish I could say I was a lifelong Frasier fan, but the truth is that I only discovered the show about five years ago. I have vague memories of episodes being on in my parents room as a child, but the way that the characters spoke, the Little Lord Fauntleroy tones of Niles and Frasier - they just told my young brain immediately that this was a
show for fancy adults and I instinctively ignored it. Flash forward to the current day and it is my absolute favorite show of all time, bar none. You could attribute that to nostalgia for a pre-9/11 world, or even nostalgia for a pre-2016 world, but hey that’s why all these 90’s/00’s era shows are getting rebooted in the first place.
One of the most comforting aspects of the original 11 seasons of Frasier is that, much like many sitcoms of its time, it was a show about the characters, not about the world around them. There wasn’t a lot of deep conversation about Watergate on That 70’s Show, Seinfeld didn’t moralize about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, and the only politician ever really mentioned on Frasier was a fake senate candidate who believed he had been abducted by aliens. But for some reason, as shows of my childhood are brought back to life in the 2020’s, they are forced to answer questions I don’t think anybody ever asked. What if the characters on Gossip Girl stopped being so toxic? What would Uncle Jesse from Full House think about cancel culture? Which beloved sitcom stars would be MAGA? Listen man, shut the fuck up.
There have been rumors of a Frasier reboot for years. The word that was going around was that Kelsey Grammar had been fielding pitches ad nauseam and was waiting for the *perfect one* to make his comeback - and I guess at some point during the pandemic he found his holy grail. There are obviously tons of challenges for any pitch here (the elephant in the room being the absence of Martin Crane following the death of the incredible John Mahoney) but I have some minor confidence that any process that was this rigorous probably yielded a pretty solid idea. Actually if you read into what Grammar wanted the original Frasier to be about (quadriplegic media mogul living with nurse Rosie Perez in Manhattan), maybe not. Anyways, what makes me really nervous is what comes next.
Frasier Crane is, at his core, a lecherous and awkward old man who loses almost all scruples at the chance to meet a celebrity or stick his dick into a woman 20 years his junior. In the course of 11 years of the show’s run, he tries and fails to sleep with at least 150 women, sometimes nearly a half dozen in a single 21 minute episode. Frasier is a guy who wants to fuck but can’t. If he has a cause he stands up for, it is merely because he wants to fuck. If he is nice to the dog or his dad or a friendly teenager in need of tutoring - it is because he wants to fuck. Frasier would have joyfully been Jeffrey Epstein’s inner circle if given the opportunity, and gasped with glee at an invite to Little St. James. He is a singular being, driven entirely by ego and libido. Don’t get me wrong - we’re all rooting for him - but you can’t be a genuine fan of Frasier and not recognize this, the most defining aspect of his character.
The show itself is about as timeless as network tv is capable of being. If a piece of technology is mentioned, it is only in passing, and only as a function of driving the plot forward - a cell phone battery dies, a loud answering machine embarrasses Frasier in front of company, moments that are touched on only for as long as is necessary to serve the storyline. Frasier never shows off his new Motorola Razr to Niles, nobody talks about how email is going to effect workplace culture - the show is about the people, not the things.
So this brings me to my plea, which I make directly to the writers of the new season. You’re going to feel the urge to make Frasier “learn his lesson”, to realize that his brazen, Boomer-esque style of behavior is in conflict with the cultural rules of the world we live in now. You’ll want to make him atone, to learn, to make amends - possibly via an unlikely friendship with a Gen-Z costar played by Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter. You’ll want to make him try online dating, to buy NFTs and to have an opinion about BLM. I am begging you to resist these urges. There are plenty of shows that are more than capable of tackling these issues, shows that were created from the ground up to do so. Frasier simply isn’t that show. Frasier is about a guy who wants to fuck but can’t.