Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Kelsey Grammer, Jack Cutmore-Scott, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Toks Olagundoye, Jess Salgueiro, Anders Keith, Jimmy Dunn, Kevin Daniels, Renee Pezzotta, Parvesh Cheena, Cheyenne Perez, Owen Lloyd, Amy L. Workman, John Bucy, Bebe Neuwirth, Peri Gilpin.

There are few actors that can so embody a character that they are capable of being that beloved person for more than one generation of television or film lovers; just a picture of them will place the viewer’s mind as one whose figure is nothing but the persona that they closely associate with, and nothing else they have done will frame the expression of laughter or dramatic role more.

For almost forty years Kelsey Grammer has inhabited the soul of Dr. Frasier Crane. From being the intellectual barfly in Cheers, the first decade long appearance in his own spin off, the self-titled Frasier, and now the return of the loveable but often clueless of his own self in a new home far from his time in Seattle, Kelsey Grammer has been at the forefront of some of the finest comedy in one character in American television history.

Perhaps like Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H, viewers can understand that a particular topic or storyline requires one character on which to focus upon, to highlight the terror of working under intense pressure of war and using humour to deflect the trauma, or in the case of Frasier Crane to show how the mind is one capable of such astonishing innovations, but is cruelly let down by our own pomposity of self.

Frasier is a return that is emotionally welcome, in a period of time where we have found ourselves at odds with intellectual discourse, the fact that we can look to a man now in the third act of his life and laugh at the insanity of the world through the eyes of a man seeing his life turn full circle, of becoming in all effects his own father, albeit without the blue collar charm and insight that Martin Crane, played by the much loved and much missed John Mahoney, brought to the family life.

Comfortable, still as funny as it was in its first incarnation, Frasier’s presence on screen is given a new lease of life with the inclusion new characters, whilst retaining a couple of superb appearances by actors making cameos in their own observed roles. With Peri Gilpin returning in the finale of the first series as Frasier’s old radio producer Roz Doyle, and Bebe Neuwirth as the ex-wife Lilith, and alongside the wonderful Nicholas Lyndhurst, Jack Cutmore-Scott, and Toks Olagundoye, what transpires on screen is a continuation of a story that we have been privy to for five decades; and one that still has the power to bring that one thing we need to survive in a world of unrelenting tragedy…laughter.

Repeating the same joke and expecting something different doesn’t work, but maintaining the reason for the scenario in the first place absolutely can show growth in the most human way, and for that Frasier is back with aplomb. 

Ian D. Hall