The Frasier Reboot is a perfect example of a TV revival gone bad

According to Chris Snellgrove
| Published 23 seconds ago

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

Frasier Reboot Plot

Unless you have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing it Frasier reboot for yourself, here’s the synopsis: we begin with our title character at a crossroads after his father dies, Charlotte leaves him, and his Dr. Phila ends. He decides to start over, moving back to Boston to start a new concert teaching at Harvard while rebuilding his relationship with his son. However, everything from the difficulty of settling into a new job and finding a common culture with his firefighter son is a constant reminder that Frasier may have gotten older, but not wiser.

Why is it bad?

With that summary out of the way faster than Eddie running out of the tub why I think Frasier reboot is the best example of a bad TV revival? The first and perhaps main reason is that the revival’s main cast is missing literally all of the ensemble characters that made the original show a hit. Returning characters are mostly split into small cameos, leaving viewers with a new cast of characters that just aren’t as entertaining or compelling as the previous ensemble.

It’s not the actors fault. The cast is generally talented, but as original Frasier writer Ken Levine explained on Hollywood & Levine that none of the characters in the reboot other than his son have any real connection to Frasier himself. This includes fellow Harvard professor Alan Cornwall, said to be a “best friend” but “never talked about once” in Cheers or Frasier. That’s a great point, and the longer he talked, the more I realized that a lot of the show’s character problems are what’s constantly being revealed (both narratively and comedically), which could make for a stellar reboot.

Levine’s breakdown also includes Eva, a new mother who lives with Frasier’s son in the reboot after her firefighter boyfriend dies. Levine emphasizes that we need to ask an important question about her character’s story: “What does this have to do with Frasier?” He then asked if it would be possible to “lose that character,” before confidently answering his own question: “He certainly could “.

The last character Levine targeted for the Frasier reboot was Olivia Finch, Frasier’s dean at Harvard, who is all too eager to hire a high-profile celebrity to teach at the university. The writer asked a big question: when it comes to a university as prestigious as Harvard, “what do they give a ***” about hiring famous faculty, something that only “a very small college, some manufactured Middlebury University” would care about. .” Her fascination with celebrity status also makes it difficult to answer the question “what is her role? when it comes to bossing Frasier around.

It’s actually getting better

Reading his thoughts felt like a revelation. Honestly, I felt a bit like Frasier himself as I internally recovered from the new series and Levine came in as Martin to talk some blunt sense into me. An ensemble show is by definition nothing without his characters and Frasier the restart always succeeded or failed based on the strength of his characters. But compared to the old one Frasier to the new reboot, it’s easy to see that the characters of the new series have failed on all fronts.

Yet all of them FrasierThe glitches didn’t stop the reboot from getting a second season, and this season (to be fair) they managed to flesh out their existing characters while bringing back original fan favorite Roz Doyle. While Season 1 was a perfect example of bad TV revival, Season 2 finally seems to be moving (albeit very slowly and still with somewhat clunky characters) in the right direction. And that leaves us with a moral worthy of a classic Frasier The Christmas episode: that it’s never too late for even the worst of us to work on becoming better.