(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the dilemmas of the modern streaming age is should you go back to a classic show, revisit and revise it, reboot and redo it?
To be fair, it’s not the sort of questions many, if any, of the corporations behind the plethora of streaming platforms are asking themselves; they simply see a property to be exploited, a show that will immediately attract fans of the classic show/s and a chance to add to their library content with minimal creative effort and maximum potential views lying in wait.
But going back, can be hazardous, and while the creators of Frasier are loathe to call it a reboot, preferring to see the new iteration of the classic Cheers/Frasier character as a “third act”, the first episode would suggest everyone involved may have gone back to the Bostonian well just a little too often.
In the new take on an old character who first appeared on Cheers in 1984, Frasier (Kelsey Grammer who fought hard to bring his signature character back from the TV grave) pops back to Boston to both give a guest lecture at Harvard as a favour to an old Oxford college buddy, Alan Cornwell (Nicholas Lyndhurst) and to try and reconnect with his blue collar worker son, Freddy (Jake Cutmore-Scott) who has dropped out of his psych studies and is pursuing an apparently very satisfying career as a fireperson.
Even before the show gets going, you can see that in one fell swoop, the all-new, and yet not-so-new Frasier has brought back one of the key engines of the classic, much-awarded 1993-2004 iteration, which is the eternal battle between the elite and the everyman, a dynamic that got traction, pathos and a great many laughs from the way in which Frasier and his dad, played by the sadly departed John Mahoney, interacted.
This time around, the duct-taped grotty green recliner is replaced by a plastic container of dirt from Fenway Park, and now as then, Frasier, who through events best left to the watching of the first two episodes, now has Freddy living with him, struggles with someone else’s aesthetically challenging but emotionally meaningful items ruining the look and feel of his carefully curated apartment.
It’s at this point that you might be thinking that it’s not looking all that original but somehow, the team behind the Frasier revival, Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli, manage to make it look somewhat fresh and fun, although at that point, the writing feels more garden variety sitcom obvious than inspired Emmy Award-winning clever.
Much of the first two episodes feels like none-too-subtlely flagged joke followed by none-too-subtlely flagged joke with characters like Cornwell, his and Frasier’s eventual boss, Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the head of Harvard University’s psychology department, and Frasier’s bumbling, Niles and Daphne-sired nephew David (Anders Keith) – he was born in the 2004 Frasier finale if you recall – feeling like one-note joke vessels that may soon wear out their welcome.
But somehow by the second episode, helped along by Kelsey Grammer’s sublime delivery which includes an arch way with observational wisecracks that delight now as they did then, Frasier begins to find its feet, the characters start to feel like belong together and a tentative rhythm begins to take hold which suggests the all-new Frasier might just have some of the comedy chutzpah and heartfelt meaningfulness of its predecessor.
In fact, a review in The Guardian by someone lucky to have seen a fuller sweep of the episodes that this mere blogger, suggests this embryonic sense of tentative comedy gold is an indicator of very good things to come, and while it’s rare indeed that you can capture lightning in a bottle three times, let alone once, it’s starting to look like Frasier may just be back and back with all the charm, humanity, fun and laughs of the old shows, a sign that while going back can be a corporately cynical money-grubbing exercise by some, it can also result in a lovely reunion that may trade on nostalgia sure but which might also have some entertainingly enjoyable legs of its own.
Frasier is currently streaming on Paramount+ with the remaining eight episodes of the first season slated to release weekly until 7 December.
Star Trek: Lower Decks S4 (E3-7)
Everyone is growing up! It was bound to happen sooner or later, and honestly, any TV/streaming series worth its character-rich salt can’t leave it’s characters exactly the same for its entire run, even if its original premise pivoted entirely on how they acted in the first season. It’s tempting to just stop the clock and freeze the frame but too much of that and the storylines grow stale, the jokes that once dazzled and zinged fall flat to the ground and everyone walks away, wondering what happened to their favourite show. So kudos, and then some, to Star Trek: Lower Decks, which has not only promoted Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) and Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) but forced through some nifty plot devices to start acting a little bit more like the grown-ups they are increasingly becoming. But while maturity for all has well and truly burst out of the blocks, that doesn’t mean it won’t be awkward, difficult or in this comedically delightfully animated powerhouse, very, very funny. Take the episode “In the Cradle of Vexilon” where the USS Ceritos lands on a very cool looking artificial ring planet Corazonia, made naturally enough by ancient aliens, where they’ve been tasked with rebooting or re-something-ing the omnipotent but super friendly and not at all domination craving AI Vexilon, upon which all life on the world depends. When things don’t go as planned, and that’s putting it mildly, it’s up to Boimler on his first Away Team as a commander to act like a leader, something he’s not that good at doing until a pep talk from visiting Vulcan officer T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) and an unforgiving, explosively volcanic situation force his hand and he has to make decisions and order people around to save their lives and the day. He does it but not without a lot of anxious Boimler-ing, which is hilarious but also kind of grounded in a way because who of us hasn’t collapsed in the pile of our Imposter Syndrome-ness when called to step up? We usually step up, and get used to that rarefied position of being in the hot seat calling the shots, but it takes some getting used to and while you’re laughing at Boimler trying to adapt to all that authority, you’re also nodding in recognition too. Likewise with Beckett Mariner who you will recall has not had the easier relationship with being a person in a position of authority – maybe it’s because her mum, Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) is the captain or maybe she’s always been a rebel, but she’s not handling being someone that Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) seems to have faith and confidence in. You can tell her natural inclination is to act up once again but in both “Something Borrowed, Something Green” and “Empathological Fallacies”, where the crew of the USS Cerritos loses their mind to endless partying, she steps up magnificently well, and even though you know it irks her to an extent to let maturity win out over rebelliousness, she does it anyway and is the one who guides to situations to soft and satisfactory landings. While these four episodes are hilarious and have the usual share of surreal silliness – sentient computers going crazy in “A Few Badgeys More”; we are totally there for it! – and affectionately satirical Star Trek references, such as a funny reference about a situation being so bad you couldn’t fix it in an hour, what really strikes you is how much our intrepidly goofy and eager foursome are growing up. Not perfectly, because where would be the fun in that, but enough that Lower Decks is growing and developing too becoming a show with its eye still firmly on the ridiculous but also on some rather sage humanity too. It’s a potently pleasing brew and it augurs well for the show going forward and for the final three episodes where maybe the arc of the weird ship destroying other ships will finally become more than a tantalising mystery, thinly sketched.
Star Trek: Lower Decks is streaming on Paramount+