Today’s television lives, like many of those who consume it, from nostalgia. Reboots, or sequels intended to update classic series, are the order of the day: in recent years, Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Roseanne and Murphy Brown have given rise to modernizations that have something in common: all They are melancholic—and, at times, a little pathetic—repetitions of their nineties originals, which they recall more in the signifier than in the meaning. Frasier is the last corpse to leave the cryogenization chamber. Kelsey Grammer returns to play the affected and endearing psychiatrist, undoubtedly the role of a lifetime – with the permission of Supporting Actor Bob, who has voiced her since 1990 on The Simpsons -, although everything else has changed.
The original series took place in a non-grunge Seattle. The reboot that SkyShowtime has just released returns to the place where it all began: Boston, where the character of Frasier appeared in the eighties as a member of the large cast of Cheers. There, the protagonist meets his son, Freddy, who reproaches him for having been a bad father. To make amends for the mistakes of the past, Frasier takes a job at Harvard, buys the building where his offspring resides, and forces her to live with him. As if, to demonstrate his love, there was no other option than to share a habitat with that thirty-something son, a peculiar solution coming from an expert in the Oedipus complex.
More information
To modernize the series, Freddy could have been a young woke man who questioned his father’s privilege, his incorrigible snobbery and his apparent apoliticism. The bet of the new Frasier is much more conservative: a lazy conflict between the pompous psychiatrist and his son, with vulgar tastes, who has left his studies at Harvard to become a firefighter (in an amazing leap of continuity, fans of the original will remember that the last time we saw Freddy he was a goth teenager, with few friends and many allergies). The objective is to recreate Frasier’s conflict with his own father, the masterful John Mahoney, who died in 2018, although the result is far from the original. Neither are Niles or Daphne, and it is undeniable that they are missed (Roz and Lilith, Frasier’s icy ex, will appear as guests this season).
Nicholas Lyndhurst and Kelsey Grammer, in the first episode of the return of ‘Frasier’.Chris Haston/Paramount+
The first Frasier was full of extravagances that made it a unique product on television at that time and opposed all its Aristotelian rules: the playful intertitles, the strange song of the credits, the absent character of Maris, the dissident masculinity of its protagonists, the audacity of seeing Frasier sleeping with Freud during a wet dream. Except for the canned laughs, there is almost nothing from the original that survives in this sequel, which is no disaster, but a tasteless disappointment. Only Grammer saves it, with a bomb-proof charm (he even manages to make us forget that he voted for Donald Trump), although his excessive prominence opposes the choral magic that the first installment had.
If the young characters are calamitous, the protagonist’s new classmates at Harvard are more interesting: a professor and friend from his youth, all British phlegm (the veteran Nicholas Lyndhurst), and Frasier’s new boss, played by the Nigerian Toks Olagundoye, who distances the series from the nuclear target that characterized it in the nineties. In a university party sequence, the three star in a tangled farce that is reminiscent, if we are a little generous, of those that were so abundant in the original series, including Latin jokes.
It arrives in the fifth episode, the last one we have been able to see, as we begin to discover the vulnerability of these new characters, one of the keys to the success of the first series: the inevitable attachment caused by their ridiculousness, their paradoxes and their traumas. In reality, the first episodes of Frasier in the nineties were not glorious either, which did not prevent the following 11 seasons from making television history. Maybe we should give this rear-guard sitcom a little more time. The question is whether the platform will do it.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Receive the television newsletter
All the news from channels and platforms, with interviews, news and analysis, in addition to the recommendations and criticisms of our journalists
APÚNTATE
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
2023-11-10 13:15:13
#Frasier #rearguard #comedy
