What’s with all the screen veterans and the zeitgeisty comedy lately? February blessed us with the ludicrously brilliant final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a vehicle for that notorious contrarian Larry David (77 years old). August delivered a glorious fourth outing for Only Murders in the Building, which stars septuagenarian pals Steve Martin (79) and Martin Short (74). Last October, meanwhile, saw the arrival of the much-anticipated Frasier revival, a sequel to the era-defining 90s sitcom starring a now-69-year-old Kelsey Grammer.
All three shows deal in nostalgia to some extent: the last episode of Curb riffed archly on the controversial 1998 finale of Seinfeld (co-created by David), while the old-school comic chops of Martin and Short means Only Murders inevitably stirs up memories of farces past. Yet both programmes also feel distinctly modern: Only Murders is a genre-bending thriller about true-crime podcasters that knows exactly how to tap into weird meme-y humour, while Curb pioneered a meta-naturalism that contemporary comedy continues to heed.
That’s not something you could ever say about Frasier 2.0, which resurrects not only its titular protagonist but also the dated studio sitcom genre. In the 20 years since the original ended, shows soundtracked by audience laughter have pretty much died out – as has the artifice of the art form’s tempo and tone. It’s rather disorientating to witness such old-fashioned TV mechanics playing out in the present day in the new Frasier, which now returns for a second season. In fact, it’s enough to give you temporal vertigo: so this is what it would’ve been like if they’d had smartphones in the 90s!
What’s even weirder, though, is that the Frasier revival has turned out to be fine. Faint praise, but praise nonetheless. This is despite the show’s obvious flaws: a script that creaks under the weight of exposition – especially in the first season, as our titular celebrity psychiatrist relocates to Boston to be near his estranged son, Freddy, a firefighter, landing a job at the university in the process. Then there’s the strange phenomena of punchlines that materialise before the cast have even finished the setups; the humour is basic and formulaic by any standards.
So how and why does it work? The flawless cast, mainly. Grammer is obviously very good at being Frasier Crane, still an inveterate snob, and still looking for love. More surprising is that his new foil, work-avoidant Harvard colleague Alan Cornwall, is played so convincingly by Rodders himself, Nicholas Lyndhurst (a close friend of Grammer’s). Alan is both posh and repressed and disaffected and disobedient: Lyndhurst pulls off this cartoonish but complex persona with aplomb, while Toks Olagundoye works similar wonders as the pair’s goofy yet imperious department head, Olivia. As Freddy and his friend Eve, Jack Cutmore-Scott and Jess Salgueiro provide enough cool to offset the cringe (also great is Anders Keith as David, Frasier’s highly strung student nephew). The guests are first-class too: season two has Amy Sedaris as a fangirling therapist and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom as an apparent Crane-clone, while original cast members Peri Gilpin (Roz Doyle) and Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe Glazer) also return.
The other, less-inspiring reason why the new Frasier is a success is that comedy doesn’t actually need to be good – or clever, or fresh – to be funny. Comparing this awkwardly ersatz show to the original, you may notice that it is less fleet-footed, less ingeniously plotted and less inherently compelling – but it will probably make you laugh the same amount. Turns out that even with a relatively low hit-rate, relentless wisecracking and unoriginal slapstick still guarantees laughs (I don’t want to find David’s predictably disastrous attempts to unpackage a valuable leg of jamón funny, but I do anyway).
As per studio sitcom tradition, the second season doesn’t advance the action much: each episode sports a superficial storyline (Frasier writes a memoir; Frasier plays cupid; Frasier babysits) with slightly weightier undertones. Frasier still exists primarily as a cog in an exaggerated high-brow/low-brow dynamic, formerly with his father and latterly with his son, which means old ground is retrod. Millennial-boomer tension might have been more interesting. In one of the new episodes, Roz convinces exhausted single mum Eve to have a night out, encouraging her to take up the baton of the endless pulling spree that was the late-20th-century urban sitcom. Eve is turned off, correctly identifying that Roz is projecting her own (outmoded) desires on to her.
There are also many jokes about Frasier’s enormous wealth, yet the generational divide that underlies them is never explored. As Grammer’s peers have proven, this revival could have been more than a faintly satisfying exercise in 90s cosplay.
• Frasier is on Paramount+ now.
