The Frasier Revival Saved The Best Returning Star For Last
This article contains spoilers for the "Frasier" reboot season finale.
With this latest episode, the holiday-themed "Reindeer Games," the first season of Paramount's "Frasier" revival has finally come to an end. It's felt both too short and dragged out, refreshingly joyous and embarrassingly flat, an important addition to the modern TV landscape and an unnecessary one. As we viewers (and we at /Film) anatomize the revival's hits and misses, it's important to pause and reflect on the complicated and synecdotal final bang the season went out on. That would be the return of Peri Gilpin's Roz.
"Reindeer Games" comes as close to classic "Frasier" farce as any episode this season, save a few gags, like Eve's (Jess Salgueiro) convoluted play in episode 6, "Blind Date," June Diane Raphael's guest appearance in that same episode, and a smattering of references to deep cut original series lore. This episode adopts a tried and true "Frasier" episode conceit — allowing the good doctor's love of the finer things and unrealistically high standards to blind him to the fact that everything's on an unavoidable path to failure and disappointment. Here, that takes the form of a Christmas party that Frasier plans so poorly it forces all of his guests across the hall to Eve's for simple snacks, beer, and Hallmark holiday movies.
After Frasier accidentally orders over a dozen Christmas trees, buys a live goose instead of a cooked one, and hires a student orchestra instead of a professional quartet, things seem hopeless. Leave it to his old pal Roz (by the invitation of Freddy, the day's true saver) to swoop in and pick him up, as she did countless times over the original series' 11-season run. It's a glorious feeling for Frasier and the audience alike seeing her familiar face, but Gilpin's appearance also indicates exactly what went wrong with this revival.
To be nostalgic ...
Within moments of her appearance at Frasier's new apartment door, Roz utters a line that will surely send fans of the series tripping through a loop of nostalgia — "Damnit, Frasier!" The two go for a nightcap at Frasier's new local haunt, a still unnamed bar, and talk through how unfairly he'd been treating everyone in the episode, especially Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott). In their usual, symbiotic way, they process each other's baggage, face some tough truths, and settle into the snug security of enduring friendship. But then you have to watch the rest of the episode.
The episode's B- and C-plots consist of Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst) and David (Anders Keith) trying to get party guests to say the names of Santa's reindeer and Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) suddenly and improbably falling for Freddy's coworker, Moose (Jimmy Dunn). Actually, I can see the opposites attract angle they may be going for with Olivia and Moose, but there was zero build-up or indication over the course of the season, and plenty of instances where the two were in the same place where there could have been. Alan and David's game is, honestly, teeth-grindingly dull. But you have to sit through it to get to the good stuff with Frasier, Freddy, and Roz.
Herein lies the problem that Roz's very appearance encapsulates: it's impossible to know how good the series is on its own merits because it's been so weighed down by nostalgia bait, but without that bait, it's unclear how many people would be watching at all.
... or not to be at all?
The second Gilpin walks on screen it's like the brightness boosted by 50 percent and the laugh track feels like a group of friends you're laughing with, not a hard stick thrust at you to manipulate you into laughing at jokes that just aren't funny. Peri Gilpin is a star. Kelsey Grammer is a star. David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves are too, and so was John Mahoney. It's extraordinary that the original "Frasier" was able to gather so many incredible performers under one roof and keep them there for eleven seasons. It's even more incredible that that series was funny from the start.
Plenty of sitcoms take a season or two to get into the swing of things. "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" didn't find its groove until Danny DeVito joined the cast, and even "Seinfeld" stumbled more than once in its first season. The same could be true of "Frasier," but there are two things working against it. First, it will always live in comparison to the original, which took off without a hitch and barely ever dipped in quality, and second, the original "Frasier," itself a continuation of the beloved sitcom "Cheers," proved some series hit the ground running, fully formed.
Gilpin's appearance on "Frasier" is for this reason a strange one. She's simultaneously the best guest star they've had so far, effortlessly natural not only with Grammer but with the rest of the cast. She's utterly magnetic, practically radiating energy whenever she's on screen, and by comparison, she illuminates how dimly the rest of the cast member's lamps are lit. Maybe, if "Frasier" receives a second season order, her brief but wondrous appearance on "Reindeer Games" can be used as the light that shines the way forward.
"Frasier" is available to stream in full on Paramount+.