Kelsey Grammer always had a feeling that he might return to the role of Frasier Crane, but it was some unexpected inspiration that motivated him to finally say yes to a reboot series.
ET’s Kevin Frazier sat down with the actor and producer on Wednesday, where he opened up about how he came to say yes to the long-anticipated Frasier reboot after years of speculation.
“There’s a few things that happened over the last decade,” he said of what inspired the decision. “One of them, that was the most pivotal, was Roseanne Barr’s show was returned to television. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s sort of a contemporary of ours,’ and I thought, well, that makes it kind of interesting that there was an appetite for that kind of show again.”
Roseanne was briefly revived in 2018 after being canceled by ABC in 1997. Following controversial social media comments by Barr, the series was revamped without her as The Conners and has run for five seasons since. In November 2023, it was renewed for its sixth season.
When it came to rebooting Frasier (which was itself a spinoff of Cheers), Grammer said, “I did believe it was gonna come back around — it just needed a little bit more time to ferment.”
Initially, the actor said, the plan was to have all the original legacy cast members return for the new series — similar to The Conners — but after “that ship had sailed,” Grammer said he was most interested in exploring a brand new chapter for his eponymous psychiatrist and talk show host.
“It suddenly appealed to me — What would it be? What would his third act be?” he recalled. “It has to be something other than what we’ve done before… We dived right into this idea of going back to Boston and centering the relationship around his relationship with his son, so it would sort of bookend it with the previous show.”
In the original series’ premiere, Frasier has moved back from Boston to Seattle to be with his aging father, Martin — played by the late John Mahoney — and take on a new role as a radio host. In the new Frasier, fresh off the success of his television talk show, Frasier finds himself back in Beantown and struggling to repair his relationship with his own son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott).
“Frasier has gotten a lot of the things he wanted — or that he thought he wanted,” Grammer said of where his character starts out in the new series. “He got success, and he walked away from it.”
“He’s looking for something important,” he continued. “His son’s important — that’s there. And he has this other sort of image of himself, [from] when he was a young man when he first arrived in Boston. What was he going to be? He never quite figured out. So he’s back to figure that out.”
Frasier‘s 10-episode first season concludes on Dec. 7 on Paramount+. And while Grammer is looking forward to continuing Frasier Crane’s third act with possible future seasons of the reboot, that’s not the only show he’s hoping to revive. The actor and producer also said he’d love to see new life for Girlfriends, the sitcom starring Tracee Ellis Ross that ran from 2000-2008, on which Grammer served as an executive producer.
“I’ve shouted it out to Tracee Ellis on the television already, when I was doing some press in New York last week,” he said. “So yeah, lets think about it.”
While he hasn’t yet heard back from Ross, Grammer said he’d also love to see more episodes of The Game — another show he produced — which was revived for two seasons on Paramount+ from 2021-23.
“I’d still love to see Paramount+ decide to keep that around, but we’ll see,” the actor said. “The strikes always kind of throw a monkey wrench into things… We’re on equal footing now, we seem to have a direction forward and hopefully that will grow into something.”
Frasier‘s 10-episode first season concludes with a Christmas-themed episode, which debuts Dec. 7 on Paramount+.
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