Why The New Series Of Frasier Didn’t Work

It failed because it wasn’t about failure

The cast of the new series of Frasier with director James Burrows (CBS/Paramount+)

Thanks to Channel 4 showing multiple episodes every morning for the past couple of decades, the original series of Frasier has a strange cultural ubiquity in the UK.

And yet, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who watched the recent revival of it, mainly because it was solely on Paramount+, not served up in a constant familiar repetition as a background to sick days and late breakfasts. While it ran for two seasons, it seems odd that the revival of a sitcom that not only ran for a decade but still consistently attracts viewers two decades after it finished departed with so little fanfare, quietly dropped by Paramount before a third season aired.

So why did this new version fail? It’s not because of character, location, tone, or structure, it’s because they forgot what made the original series work: it’s a series about failure.

Consider the way most episodes of it work: Frasier wants something, Frasier goes through an escalating and often farcical series events to obtain it, and then the episode concludes with him either not getting what he wanted, or getting it and finding out it wasn’t what he wanted or thought it would be.