New Photos From ‘Frasier’ Season Two Hint at the Romance Nobody Wants

Frasier Season Two (or Season 13, depending on how you look at it) is set to premiere next month. In an effort to whet our appetite for the painfully never-ending adventures of Dr. Frasier Crane, several promotional photos from the upcoming season were recently unveiled by Entertainment Weekly.

Most of the snapshots are fairly unsurprising, although we do get to see Dr. Crane back in his old KACL studio. Also Roz is back, confirming reports that Peri Gilpin will have a more prominent role this season after popping up in last year’s holiday-themed season finale.

In another image, Frasier appears to be kissing a mysterious woman, who some fans believe could be Roz. Why his son Freddie and their neighbor Eve are reacting as if Pennywise is standing behind him with a butcher knife remains to be seen. 

While Frasier and Roz slept together in Season Nine of the original series, the only earnest attempt to explore a romance between the two characters resulted in what was arguably one of the lowest points in the entire show. The Season 10 finale found Roz dramatically insisting that Frasier break up with his girlfriend Julia, and even quitting her job at KACL. 

The love triangle plot line was a terrible, terrible idea, hence why the following season abruptly changed course. The eleventh season premiere found Roz immediately returning to her old job as Frasier’s producer, and literally laughing in his face at the suggestion that she could be harboring feelings for him. 

Seeing as the earlier show toyed with, but ultimately rejected, the idea of fostering a romance between Roz and Frasier, it seems highly unlikely that the reboot would go down that same road. 

The woman in the photo could be someone entirely different, or, if it is, in fact, Roz, perhaps this kiss is just in service of an elaborately farcical web of lies that eventually blows up in everybody’s faces, as is par for the course in the Frasier-verse.

This image may be slightly confusing for fans, but it’s far from the worst Frasier promotional photo. Back in the ‘90s, NBC routinely advertised the acclaimed show by forcing its award-winning cast to pose for increasingly baffling shoots in which, say, Kelsey Grammer tears his hair out in front of a Malcolm in the Middle-esque fish-eye lens, all while his co-stars are evidently plotting to murder him.

Then there’s the one where Martin is hypnotizing his sons, for some reason:

And one year they just said “fuck it” and put the whole cast in denim:

All of which is to say, just because there’s a kiss in one photo, doesn’t mean that a serious romantic subplot is brewing. After all, there is no denim-only season of the original Frasier.

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