The reboot, which picks up 20 years later, is extra of a pleasing throwback than a reinvention, and that appears to be the purpose. This new collection does all the pieces potential to echo the outdated, together with changing its lacking characters with facsimiles.
Frasier is again in Boston, the place he was the unlikely common on the bar in Cheers earlier than he acquired his personal spin-off collection. Mahoney died in 2018, so filling the working-class slot, we now have Frasier’s son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who has dropped out of Harvard to turn out to be a hearth fighter, as if salt-of-the-earthiness skipped a technology.
Hyde Pierce selected to not be within the reboot, however as an alternative there’s Niles’s son, David. He’s performed by Anders Keith, a newcomer with knowledgeable comedian timing, who enlivens each scene he’s in. He makes David a pleasant echo of Niles, as a nervous, socially inept Harvard scholar, nearly as grandiloquent in his speech as his uncle.
However except David, the brand new characters by no means take off. There’s a Cheers-like bar the place Frasier hangs out together with his one-note outdated Oxford classmate, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst), a psychology professor at Harvard who loves Scotch whisky and hates to work. In addition they meet there with Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the bold head of the college’s psychology division. She is determined to recruit Frasier, who within the years between collection has turn out to be wealthy and well-known doing a tv model of his outdated radio call-in present; this fictional Harvard is relentlessly foolish. And Freddy’s roommate, Eve (Jess Salgueiro), is a waitress on the similar bar (actually, Boston is not that small) and vaguely echoes the common-sensical Carla from Cheers.
Grammer, as at all times, has impeccably sharp supply and timing, and the present has enjoyable skewering Frasier’s elitism. In a pompous tone, he tells the sleep-deprived mom of a crying child, “Cherish these occasions. They disappear with a merciless swiftness”, solely to seek out that the sound of his voice places the toddler to sleep. That is humorous as soon as. That the joke is repeated provides Frasier its creaky sitcom really feel. The reboot is filled with such apparent tropes.