Only goodwill will get you through this reboot: Paramount+’s Frasier reviewed

Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving Fawlty Towers? Happily, there appears to be much more goodwill behind the return of Frasier – the bad news being that, judging from the first three episodes, it might well need it.

Kelsey Grammer’s entrance – 39 years after Frasier Crane showed up in Cheers – received a huge audience ovation. All references, however straightforward, to his earlier incarnations got a guaranteed laugh. Nonetheless, for those of us desperately hoping the new series won’t be a letdown, the result so far has required an increasingly effortful keeping of the faith.

But first we were brought up to speed on Frasier’s life – and in a way that hinted accurately at the clumsiness to come. Having arrived at Boston airport to that opening ovation, Frasier was met by his friend Alan, who wasted no time getting down to brass tacks. ‘How was your father’s funeral?’ ‘Weren’t you travelling with your nephew, Niles and Daphne’s son?’ ‘How are things between you and Freddy? I remember how tense it was when he dropped out of Harvard.’

Equally shameless is that the original cast have been replaced with characters who feel far too obvious an attempt to relive – or simply repeat – past glories. Frasier’s scene-stealing brother Niles, for example, has been spilt into two. Supplying the languid put-downs is Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst, much to British surprise). Embodying the neuroses is nephew David, with his laminated card listing his allergies (‘The ones in red are fatal’). The role of blue-collar foil to Frasier’s pretensions – formerly played by his beer-drinking policeman father – has here fallen to his son Freddy: last seen as a chess-playing nerd, but now a beer-drinking fireman.