Frasier heads back to Seattle, and we take a look at the latest couple of episodes from Frasier season 2 right here.
In the last couple of weeks, we have seen two episodes of Frasier that not only display how the new series incarnation of Kelsey Grammer’s pop-psychiatrist has developed, but equally how it can never go home again. It makes for an experience part heartening and part sobering.
Starting in reverse this time, with the eighth episode, ‘Thank You, Dr Crane’, written by Stephen Lloyd, Frasier delivers what is the next nostalgic boon to audiences on the road to its ultimate treat. We’ve had Roz (Peri Gilpin), now back as a recurring character. We’ve seen the glorious Bebe Glazer (still got it, darling). Now we have a return to KACL, a principal setting of the previous series in Seattle, with two of that show’s most beloved characters returning.
Going back to Seattle was inevitable for a show entirely constructed on the nostalgia for 1990s Frasier, in step with many of the revivals we have seen across television in the last decade. To the credit of creators Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris, they’ve waited a decent amount of time to do it, allowing our new players to become relatively well formed and established. Doing this in season one would be disingenuous. The back end of season two? Just about get away with it.
The biggest logical deduction for fans would be if we’re going back to Seattle, we will surely get that ultimate nostalgic boon for the show – an appearance by Niles and Daphne. Alas, no. They are, in rather clunky dialogue exposition, swerved by virtue of having moved to California to run a vineyard. Makes sense for Niles in his retirement but across season two, we have had constant references to Niles or teases of him, far more than season one. They could be laying track for his and Daphne’s return this season or next, but currently it feels a glaring hole in the show that we’ve not seen one or both.
That said, squeezing them into ‘Thank You, Dr Crane’ would not have been the right approach and would have squeezed out, in part, who we’re there to see. Bob ‘Bulldog’ Briscoe (Dan Butler) and Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert), mainstays of the original series as recurring characters who always brought the funny. They are presented inside a (very well, to be fair) reconstituted set of Frasier’s old broadcast room which throws you straight back to 1994. There is love and adoration about the whole thing.
In a wonderful bit of attention to detail, now Roz is the station manager, they even recreate her office—replete with dangerous balcony that someone here again tries to jump off to comic effect—accurately when they really didn’t have to. It allows for a nod to Season 2’s ‘Angels in America Part III’ where Bebe pretends to be suicidal, although naturally it is less comically effective. Again though, the sense that the writers of this show truly know and revere the original series comes through, even when the comedy doesn’t quite work.
And it has to be said, that comic zing isn’t quite there with Bulldog and Gil sadly. Butler and Hibbert give it their best shot, and the writers nicely tip their hat to Butler being an out and proud gay man by making Bulldog gay (which will send a few people potty but absolutely makes sense for the character given Bulldog’s compensatory levels of turbo masculinity over the years). It just isn’t the same, however, watching these two old men try and capture what they did twenty plus years ago.
In fact, it makes you realise just how zestful Grammer and Gilpin are, as both largely retain the essence of their earlier characters despite clocking up the years. Harriet Sansom Harris equally managed to nail Bebe, perhaps helped by being more integral to the plot. Bulldog and Gil, however, should now be left in the past in Seattle, preserved in the glorious amber of what made them so entertaining way back when. Which might well be the case as the episode feels structured as a goodbye to the past in numerous regards.
Though will it be? It this the writers attempting to draw a line under everything fans want so modern Frasier can start again? Perhaps. It just strikes me as a challenge for this show not to exist with one leg firmly planted in those nostalgic flourishes. Isn’t that the entire point of this? We will see. Again, what I enjoyed was how they dialled into the Frasier and Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) as part of a way of tying off these ends, with that lingering sense that neither father or son have still quite reconciled the passing of their elder Marty.
‘Thank You, Dr Crane’ was nonetheless often a funny and charming episode, as was the outing proceeding it, ‘My Brilliant Sister’, written by Max Maduka, which displays the flipside of Frasier on the weeks it isn’t racing to explore past glories and focuses on the here and now.
I still argue that Toks Olagundoye is the most talented of the ensemble around Grammer outside of Nicholas Lyndhurst, so I’m always glad to see Olivia get a bit more focus, and bringing her much discussed, successful sister into the mix works as a good comic device.
The only problem is that as good as Community’s Yvette Nicole Brown is as the sister, holding that sense of sibling imperiousness, it’s hard to believe Olivia would always be seen as the dowdier, less successful one in the family. Olagundoye is beautiful, Olivia is highly intelligent and successful – it just doesn’t ring true. Still, they mine some fun comedy about her having multiple suitors, and Freddy channelling Daphne’s brothers in terms of frightening British accents.
I preferred the B-plot of the episode where Frasier attempts to impress a Nobel Prize winner at his party but thanks to David (Anders Keith) messing up, he fawns over the wrong man and insults the right one. Traditional comic ideas but very Frasier in concept. As a result, ‘My Brilliant Sister’ manages to work effectively, focusing on the new main characters of the show, while playing to the gallery in the way modern Frasier always does. Safe, predictable, cosy comedy that doesn’t ask too much of its audience.
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