Television executives contort themselves explaining the reappearance of shows that went off the air. Reboot? Reimagining? Revival? Does it matter what the “re” word is, as long as the program works? For a sitcom, that means staying funny. Frasier remains so in the second season of this version returning to Paramount+ on Thursday, September 19, with new episodes dropping weekly.
Toks Olagundoye, Kelsey Grammer and Nicholas Lyndhurst in Frasier: the haughty psychiatrist has barely lost a step. Credit: Paramount+ Forty years after first playing the pontificating psychiatrist on Cheers , Kelsey Grammer keeps him fresh. Partly that’s because Grammer still gets a genuine kick out of the character, which is obvious when he and the cast gather on the Paramount lot at Soundstage 18 for the table read, a first run-through of the script.
“We were standing on the stage at 31 last year, and I thought to myself, ‘What does 31 mean numerologically?’” Grammer says beforehand. “I looked it up and it meant new beginnings. I thought, ‘Oh, well then this is a very auspicious stage for us.
’ So, they kicked us out of there. ‘Fantastic!’ I thought. “But then it came up that we could go to 18, and this had never been a sitcom stage, or a comedy had ever been shot on it,” he continues from the cavernous space where Rear Window and The Graduate were shot.
The challenge for Frasier is keeping the treasured parts of the original while not letting them look as worn as his late.