The Frasier Reboot Is The Ultimate Example Of A Bad TV Revival

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 23 seconds ago

In the rare months of December, I found myself participating in my regular holiday tradition of watching Christmas episodes of my favorite sitcom. Thanks to Hulu’s holiday episode curation (why are they the only major streamer to do this?), it was easy enough to find the right episodes, and I ended up binge watching them all . Frasier‘ Christmas episodes. They were somehow even better than I remembered, but like Lillith’s arrival at a Christmas party, one thing spoiled my enjoyment: remembering that the Frasier reboot is relatively terrible and may be the best example of a bad TV revival.

Frasier Reboot Plot

If you haven’t had the dubious pleasure of experiencing the Frasier reboot for yourself, here’s the devastation: we begin with our title character at a crossroads after his father dies, Charlotte leaves him, and his Dr. Phil-esque talk show ends. He decides to start over, moving back to Boston to start a new teaching gig at Harvard while rekindling his relationship with his son. However, everything from the difficulties of settling into the new job and finding a common culture with his firefighter son are constant reminders that even though Frasier has gotten older, he hasn’t necessarily gotten any wiser.

Why It’s Bad

With that summary out of the way faster than Eddie running from a bath, why do I think the Frasier reboot is the ultimate example of bad TV revival? The first and perhaps the main reason is that the main cast of the revival is missing literally every one of the ensemble characters that made the original show a hit. Returning characters are mostly relegated to small cameos, leaving audiences with a new cast of characters that aren’t as entertaining or compelling as the previous ensemble.

That’s not the actors fault. The cast is generally talented, but as original Frasier writer Ken Levine explained on Hollywood & Levine, none of the characters in the reboot except his son have any real connection to Frasier himself. This includes fellow Harvard professor Alan Cornwall, supposedly a “best friend” but “not even once mentioned” in Cheers or Frasier. This is a great point, and the longer he talked, the more I realized that it’s the many problems with the show’s characters that continue to unravel (in narrative and comedy) what could be a stellar reboot.

Levine’s analysis also includes Eve, a new mother who lives with Frasier’s son in the reboot after her firefighter boyfriend dies. Levine points out that we have to ask ourselves an important question about her character’s story: “What does that have to do with Frasier?” He then asked if it would be possible to “lose that character” before responding definitively to his own question: “it sure could.”

The last Frasier reboot character Levine focused on was Olivia Finch, Frasier’s Dean at Harvard who is all too eager to hire a celebrity to teach at the university. The author asked the big question: when it comes to a university as prestigious as Harvard, “what do they give as ***” for hiring famous faculty, something that would only matter to “a very small college, some produced by Middlebury University.” Her preoccupation with celebrity status also makes it more difficult to answer “what is her role?” when it comes to bossing Frasier around.

It Really Gets Better

Reading his thoughts felt like a revelation. To be honest, I felt a little like Frasier himself as I internally bloviated about the new series, and Levine came in as Martin to talk me some blunt sense. An ensemble show is, by definition, nothing without his characters, and the Frasier a reboot was always going to succeed or fail based on the strength of its characters. But when comparing the old Frasier to the new reboot, it’s easy to see that the characters of the new show are a failure on all fronts.

Still, all FrasierFlaws didn’t stop the reboot from getting a second season, and that season has (to be fair) managed to improve its existing characters while bringing back fan-favorite original character Roz Doyle. While Season 1 was the ultimate example of bad TV revival, Season 2 seems like the show is finally going (if very slowly, and still with some pretty clunky characters) to the correct address. And that leaves us morally worthy of a classic Frasier Christmas episode: that it’s never too late for even the worst of us to work on getting better.