All About Eve and The Dedication keep the new Frasier’s season 2 going, but something’s not really clicking here.
It’s tricky to give the new incarnation of Frasier the increased benefit of the doubt when we are served up distinctly average episodes such as ‘All About Eve’ and ‘The Dedication’, well meaning but rather comedically insipid examples of everything this revival is accused of by many.
Principally, that it just isn’t as witty or well acted as the original. I don’t think that’s in question, even before these episodes.
The current cast, despite the comic heavyweight of Nicholas Lyndhurst and the genuinely talented Toks Olagundoye, are an average bunch of performers. Not poor. Frequently solid. Not even close to the quality of David Hyde-Pierce, Jane Leeves or John Mahoney. Nor indeed is the writing possessed of anywhere near the same verve or skill.
From the beginning, it has felt a little unfair to judge modern Frasier by those standards completely. You can’t replicate what that show had. It was comic lightning in a bottle, hence the iconic status it found, one of the rare examples of a spin-off vastly bettering its predecessor. New Frasier is built, outside of corporate obsession with IP, on our enormous goodwill for Kelsey Grammer, whose performance remains excellent even when he lacks the material.
‘All About Eve’, written by Miles Woods, certainly highlights the undeniable issues with modern Frasier in terms of our core characters. Eve (Jess Salgueiro), however you slice her, just isn’t very interesting. She’s half kooky Daphne, half sassy Roz, without ever being either. She’s defined largely by either her role as a barmaid or as the single mother with a tragic backstory. This episode seeks to address that through Roz (Peri Gilpin) herself, drafted back in to help Eve have a night out and find that zest for life.
There are clear attempts to draw a parallel here between Eve and Roz when she was of a similar age, during the original Frasier days, where she too was raising a baby while working and trying to have some semblance of a life. Roz returning in this manner does work as a plot device, allowing us to have a fair few Roz being flirty Roz moments, but her presence just displays how empty Eve as a character is in comparison. You just want to swop her out for Roz as a regular, frankly.
The idea of throwing Olivia in as the awkward one in a ‘girls night out’ is fun, but weirdly it doesn’t seem to work on screen – perhaps as Olagundoye lacks the chemistry with Salguiero or Gilpin, or rather it just isn’t on the page. Though cliched, the B-plot works better, with Frasier, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Alan (Lyndhurst) using the babysitting of Eve’s son John as a means of charming women at a posh gallery – even after they lose sight of the baby entirely.
It’s all very silly and old hat, and does allow for the rather yuck sight of Grammer cracking onto a woman at least half his age at one point with zero irony. Still, it becomes worth it for a genuinely touching Frasier and Alan moment where we learn a hidden depth to the latter which will surely play into the narrative down the road, but which allows Lyndhurst to play genuine pathos. Given his own life experiences in recent years, you can see the emotion in a story around reconnecting with a child long lost to him. The episode wisely doesn’t try and play it all for laughs and, as a result, it stands as the best thing about the entire half hour.
Sadly, there isn’t really anything in ‘The Dedication’ to warrant the story, written by Matt Kuhn, and I would go as far as to suggest this might be Frasier’s weakest tale to date. Not just because again there is something of a focus on Eve, being a celebration of her late partner’s death and the sadness of that, but rather in how it struggles to create the kind of moral conundrum for Frasier that the original show often made very successful hay with.
Here, Frasier is unhappy that Freddy is seeking counselling for his grief concerning his best friend from someone other than him, which honestly doesn’t make a lick of sense for someone with Frasier’s decades of experience in psychotherapy. Even if we remove Frasier’s anxieties about not being a good father to Freddy, or his ongoing rivalry with Lilith for his affections (the former of which lies at the heart of this new iteration), it still stretches credulity that Frasier wouldn’t accept and understand that it is healthier for his son to seek support from someone other than his psychologist father.
‘The Dedication’ in terms of comedy is built, therefore, on a serious house of cards in which Frasier compromises ethics that he simply wouldn’t do, in my opinion. It’s incredibly contrived as a means of testing his moral dipstick and doesn’t hold true. What doesn’t help is the character of Dr. Stathos (Amy Sedaris), who is profoundly annoying across the entire episode whenever on screen. Sidelining Olivia in exchange, or David (Anders Keith), who they remain having no idea what to do with in the show, is a disappointing consequence of this.
Ultimately, between these two episodes, the first of which is better than the second, we are left with Frasier raising little more than the odd smile and titter. The second season started decently but now needs a shot in the arm. Given who looks to be reappearing next week, that boost, darling, might be arriving just at the right time…
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