Season 2 of Frasier’s revival gets a lift from the return of Bebe Glazer: here’s our reviews of episodes 5 and 6 of the show.
One of the earliest leaks regarding the second season of the Frasier revival was the return of his devious agent Bebe Glazer, played majestically across the original run by Harriet Sansom Harris, and naturally this caused a flurry of expectation and excitement among Frasier fans.
Remarkably, Sansom Harris only appeared eleven times as Bebe across the original eleven seasons (and 263 episodes), popping up usually just once an entire season (on some occasions skipping seasons completely). Yet Sansom Harris’ exuberant, devilish performance played the trick of all iconic guest characters in making you think Bebe was more ubiquitous than she ultimately was.
It was inevitable that Frasier would begin the process of bringing legendary older players into the fold, beginning with Roz, and while this process still has a way to go, the arrival of Bebe in ‘The Squash Courtship of Freddy’s Father’ is a key element of nostalgia for the original run. Particularly as Sansom Harris picks up right where she left off. Like Grammer, like Peri Gilpin, she is older, a little more gravelly of voice, but she slips back into the guise of Bebe like a glove.
This was a relief to see, in all honesty, as not everyone successfully manages to capture the essence of a character they haven’t played in decades. Gillian Anderson in The X-Files revival, for example, never quite found Dana Scully in the same manner she did in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Grammer had no problem finding Frasier, nor Gilpin Roz, and Sansom Harris particularly is a delight to see revive Bebe without missing a step because she was such a delightfully exuberant, charming villain. Never a character you could use every week but always immensely fun to have around.
Writer Sasha Stroman adds to the lore of Bebe here by providing her a daughter in Phoebe Glazer (see what they did there?) played by the equally terrific Rachel Bloom, someone more than capable of executing a deliberate comic performance. She and Sansom Harris, and she and Grammer indeed, bounce off one another nicely in a story that you will absolutely see coming but is absolutely in step with Bebe’s character. No Bebe appearance would be complete without her trying to game Frasier into something for her own gain, and this is no exception.
What worked for me was tying this into an overarching theme of the season, and indeed the show – Frasier and Freddy’s (Jack Cutmore-Scott) relationship, and the former’s anxiety around the dynamic he has with his son. If the first season was about them coming together as Frasier dealt with his own father’s passing, the second feels designed to try and help them figure out who each other is, and how they connect despite their vast personal differences. Bebe’s arrival does this by making Frasier believe, for a time, that the erudite, classics loving Phoebe might be his daughter.
It’s a hoary old plot device, not just used in situation comedy (and Stroman skirts over established Frasier lore by suggesting Bebe had a baby in around the fifth season of the original show and never mentioned her across the next six years – we just have to ignore that), but it’s effective here in no small part thanks to Sansom Harris’ performance, and Bloom’s, but also in how it allows Frasier to place Freddy in a certain context. The writers never lose sight of the central joke but it isn’t just bringing Bebe back for the sake of it, much as few Frasier fans would have minded.
Speaking of returning characters, Roz pops up again as a core part of the next episode, ‘Cape Cod’, written by creators Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris, which attempts to do two things at once. Firstly, provide audiences with a ‘classic’ slice of Frasier misunderstanding farce by taking the majority of the main players (sans Nicholas Lyndhurst’s Alan and Toks Olagundoye’s Olivia, who are largely absent in both of these episodes), and placing them in a different environment (here a very Grace and Frankie-esque beach house) in order to play the main characters off one another for comic effect.
Secondly, it tries to confront an aspect of modern Frasier that is staring audiences in the face but has yet to be explored – the possibility of Freddy and Eve (Jess Salgueiro) becoming an item. Granted, her deceased partner, the father of her son, was Freddy’s best friend, so naturally you wouldn’t expect him to jump on her while he’s warm in the grave, but the show clearly wants us to feel both characters are perfect for each other and has done since the beginning. I suspected Freddy might end up gay but sadly the series isn’t quite that progressive, so a proto-typical romance between these two will have to do.
The reason ‘Cape Cod’ doesn’t entirely work is because despite Cutmore-Scott and Salgueiro having genuine chemistry, neither Freddy or Eve have the same dynamic as Niles or Daphne in the original series, where audiences both loved how unrequited it was and yearned for them to get together simultaneously. I’m not sure that really exists for Freddy and Eve. I feel them getting together would elicit little more than an ‘okay, cool’, and we move on. You couldn’t build an entire season around it as they did Niles and Daphne, who at points arguably became more key to the show than Frasier himself back in the day.
In other words, the premise of ‘Cape Cod’ doesn’t really get the neurons firing in excitement, much as the concept—both Freddy and Eve, and Frasier and Roz—believing they’re setting the other couple up, is genuinely fun. The episode isn’t badly executed, it just has nowhere near the impact of previous farces, even the first season’s ‘Blind Date’. David (Anders Keith) for once is utilised quite well, and shows some very Niles-esque affectations here, while it was nice to see a grown up Alice (played by Grammer’s actual daughter, Greer), angled more toward geek than sultry like her mother, but the rest is fairly anodyne.
Nevertheless, these are better episodes than the previous couple of weeks, and the Bebe outing could well stand as the highlight of an admittedly weaker second season of Frasier so far, which makes me wonder what the shelf-life of this revival will end up being long-term. If they consistently need to rely on legacy characters to bring the goods, that’s an ongoing problem.
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