(courtesy IMP Awards)
Frasier S2: E1-2 “Ham” and Cyrano, Cyrano”
A Meta-based featurette on season two of the Frasier revival, often called Frasier (2023), promises, with the excitable sense of hype for which this type of promo is known, that the show’s second season shows the characters settling into themselves as the writer move on from the first season, which like the initial seasons of all but the most exceptional shows, had as many misses as it had hits.
For once, all the breathlessly upbeat pronouncement Frasier (2023)’s showrunners and stars, prove to be right on the money with the first two episodes of the second season moving with a narrative fluidity and ease of characterisation that was evident in the first season but never fully realised.
While neither episode quite reaches the heights of the original Frasier iteration, you find yourself laughing a whole lot more simply because the writing feels sharper, you have some familiarity with the characters and they seem far more at ease in their own skins.
Thus, two trademark Frasier plots, high on the farce and the consequences of hubris and rash emotional reactions (two things for which the titular character is well known) are realised quite nicely, with laughs coming, as they should in any well-written sitcom, from the way in which the characters handle the increasingly farcical situations.
Again, not to the dizzyingly good effect of the original version of the show but still high enough above the sitcom hoi polloi that you want to keep the final eight episodes, which run until 14 November, just to see how many more comfortable the show and its characters will become.
In episode one, Frasier is, in typical fashion, thrilled that the $2000 Spanish ham he ordered wth long-time friend, and current Harvard colleague, Professor Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst), has finally cleared customs and that “Ham Day”, a celebration of the start of Alan and Frasier’s friendship forty years early in rural Spain, can finally take place.
But, of course, Frasier being Frasier, nothing can go smoothly nor without a self-sabotaging hitch, and much of the fun of the episode is not only watching how messy things get between Frasier and Alan on this most special of days over an incident involving Freddy (Jake Cutmore-Scott), Frasier’s son some years earlier, but also how supporting characters like Niles and Daphne’s son, David (Anders Keith) and Eve (Jess Salgueiro) infuse the show with some gloriously enjoyable slapstick fun.
The second episode revives those farcical Frasier episodes of old, and while it never really builds up a hugely chaotic head of comedic steam, it’s still a lot of fun as we watch Frasier not only maybe meet a new love interest in Holly (Patricia Heaton) but try to bring love on Valentine’s Day to Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) the chair of Harvard University’s psychology department and his boss, and Freddy’s lovably dumb colleague Moose (Jimmy Dunn) who are likely better of as friends.
But Frasier being Frasier thinks he knows best, and it’s his often-humbled arrogance, which never really seems to go away, that fuels these two episodes which are buoyant, light and fun and which prove that not only has Frasier (2023) settled happily into its groove but that it is going to deliver on the inconsistent promise of the first season and perhaps become a worth successor to the iteration that preceded it.
Frasier (2023) streams on Paramount+
Bad Monkey S1: E5 -7 “That Damn Arm Is Back” / “Yo, Would You Tell Ms. Chase I Still Love Her Like Crazy” / “A Total Cat Person”
Good lord but Bad Monkey, another show from the prodigious hands of Bill Lawrence, is a hugely enjoyable show to watch.
Even as its characters stumble along with some heavy doses of flawed humanity and the darker side of the human condition signals that prices will be paid, and how, you are smiling like a loon because the script is so committed to saying some pretty intense things in a light but still impactfully meaningful way.
Much of the show’s vivacity and sense of dialogue-driven brio comes from Vince Vaughn who absolutely excels as Andrew Yancy, a detective with hardwired integrity and an unassailable sense of right and wrong who, he admits in one of the episodes under review, often goes about doing the right things in entirely the wrong way.
Yancy’s problem is that he sees a wrong that needs to be righted, and rather than thinking it through or see where the pieces may fall, and damage him in the process, he strikes out, not only impaling himself on some fairly sharp and messy consequences but often failing to get the bad guys in a position where they can pay for their many sins.
But in episodes five through seven – “That Damn Arm Is Back” / “Yo, Would You Tell Ms. Chase I Still Love Her Like Crazy” / “A Total Cat Person” – the tide slowly begins to turn, and while the Big Bads of the piece, Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner) and her hapless and conscience-depleted husband Nick (Rob Delaney) continue to, quite literally, get away with murder, Yancy himself is faring not too badly, thank you very much.
If you were paying attention at the end of episode four, you may well wonder how that is, but suffice to say, without giving away too many spoilers in a show full to the sand-filled Floridian brim with them, that Yancy gets some justice, gets the smart, career-successful woman, county coroner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), and revives his ailing friendship with onetime partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz).
If that sounds like a lot of happy-ever-afters for a sequence of mid-season episodes, it actually works well in a playfully sunny film noir mystery series that is just as focused on the people in it as the mystery it’s trying to solve; well, not so much solve, since we know who and whatdunnit, as bring the guilty parties to some sort of very just and Shakespearian justice.
The story matters sure, and it plays out so beautifully with a cadence and a flow that barely put a sandal-clad foot wrong, but because it is so character-focused, all of whom are fulsomely fleshed out, all the various pieces from the sometimes dangerous sleuthing of Yancy & Campesino to the murderous machinations of the Striplings through to the fightback of the likes of Bahamas locals Neville (Ronald Peet), whose land was stolen off him by the Striplings, and disaffected Obeah–practicing woman Gracie aka Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), feel like smooth and necessary parts of an overall whole.
It feels almost magical how Bad Monkey manages to be both hilarious and existentially thoughtful while serving a deliciously gothic story of hubris, murder and justice waiting to be served, but Lawrence, his team and the cast carry it with aplomb, with no sense of middle scene lag and a vibrant promise of even more fun and meaningful drama to come.
Bad Monkey streams on AppleTV+