‘Frasier’ Fans Have Some Ideas for How to Save the Newly Canceled Reboot
Frasier has left the building — and by “the building,” we mean Paramount+.
The streamer everyone forgets about recently announced that it will not be picking up the Frasier reboot for a third season. While no specifics were given, one would imagine that star Kelsey Grammer’s eyebrow-raising $2 million per episode paycheck may have factored into their decision.
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Does this mean that, nearly four decades after first appearing on Cheers, we’ve now seen the last of Dr. Frasier Crane? Well, not necessarily. CBS Studios, who produces the series, is reportedly shopping around for a new streaming home. Could Frasier end up at Peacock? Or Netflix? Is Quibi still a thing?
Over on the Frasier subreddit, fans certainly have no shortage of opinions. And a number of viewers have been sharing their suggestions for how the show should proceed, should Frasier 2.0 be picked up by another company.
A lot of fans seem to agree that it would be nice if the show were revived by NBC for a full 22-episode season, just like the original series. Both seasons of the revival consisted of just 10 episodes, which some argued just “feels too short.”
And while truncated seasons may be the norm in the streaming era, for a three-camera sitcom like Frasier, the shortened run certainly didn’t do it any favors. Limiting the seasons seemingly made viewers scrutinize each individual episode even more than they may have if it had been a bigger batch of episodes. Just one clunker has a dramatic impact on one’s overall perception of the show, considering that it accounts for 10 percent of the entire season.
Others submitted that a reboot of the Frasier reboot should stop making Frasier so “silly” and attempt to illustrate how the quick-witted character may have evolved over the years. Some noted that the gap between seasons was too long. One fan floated the idea of bringing Frasier back for one final episode in which Frasier wakes up in bed with Charlotte — his love interest from the final season of the original show — and realizes that the entire Paramount+ show was just a bad dream.
But the majority opinion, it would seem, is that the show should just stay dead. “This turkey can’t be saved,” one fan claimed. A lot of people seem to think that the show was doomed from the start due to its inability to secure original cast members like David Hyde Pierce, and because of the controversial creative decision to make Frasier’s son Freddy a “bro,” despite how wildly different that characterization is from what we saw of him on the original Frasier.
Another fan pointed out that the episode in which Frasier journeys to Seattle and discovers that his old radio station, KACL, is a “shadow of its former self” inadvertently served as an allegory for the new Frasier.
But at least KACL didn’t pay Bulldog $2 million an episode.
