Because time is a flat circle and Kelsey Grammer has alimony payments to make, we’re getting yet another season of Frasier. While the Paramount+ reboot doesn’t come back until September, a trailer for Season Two just dropped, giving fans a peek at the return of Roz, Bulldog, Gil and a bunch of other characters who frustratingly aren’t named “Niles.”
But — and I fully acknowledge that this is clearly at the bottom of the list of things to get upset about in the world right now — the trailer ends with an exchange that feels completely out-of-step with the larger continuity of the show.
When we see Frasier return to his old studio at KACL in Seattle, he introduces Bulldog to Freddy, and Freddy tells the host (who somehow hasn’t been canceled in the past two decades): “I used to listen to your show all the time as a kid. Big sports fan.”
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Okay, first of all, Bulldog has already met Freddy, back when he was a kid in Season Four of the original show. In one of the character’s rare endearing moments, Bulldog tries to talk up Frasier’s nonexistent softball skills, so as not to make him look bad in front of his son.
NBC
You’d think that current day Bulldog’s reaction would be more surprised at how much Freddy has grown, as opposed to what feels like an introduction between total strangers.
Weirder still, Freddy’s claim that he was a big fan of Bulldog’s as a kid feels totally at odds with the character we saw on the show. And not just because he mostly grew up in Boston and likely wasn’t listening to much Seattle radio. When he did meet Bulldog, Freddy was mostly just unimpressed by his subpar intelligence. He never showed an interest in sports as a child, and was always depicted as a big nerd. Although, admittedly, as the show progressed, he did eventually become a big nerd who also dressed like The Crow.
Frasier 2.0 has shown us that Freddy grew up to become a jock firefighter, in a conspicuous attempt to engineer the same kind of father-son, blue-collar versus elite intellectual conflict that Frasier shared with Martin Crane.
Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that they get to rewrite the history of the character.
Sure, this may just be a minor continuity error, but Frasier has previously gone out of its way to remedy minor continuity errors, such as when Sam Malone visited the show and the writers went out of their way to come up with a solution for why Frasier never mentioned having a brother on Cheers, and once claimed that his father was dead.
Freddy’s sudden Bulldog fandom also calls attention to what is arguably the show’s biggest problem: Freddy doesn’t feel like the same character. At all.
It feels like a huge missed opportunity that the show didn’t just cast Trevor Einhorn (Freddy from Season Four onwards). He’s still a working actor; in addition to scoring a recurring role in Mad Men, just earlier this year he showed up in Curb Your Enthusiasm to berate Larry David about his group texting etiquette.
Bringing back Einhorn would have imbued the new Frasier with an actual sense of meaning and purpose. No offense to the guy who landed the part, Jack Cutmore-Scott, but changing up actors in this key role only furthers the sense that the show is less of a continuation of Frasier and more just another run-of-the-mill Kelsey Grammer sitcom (of which there have been many) that happens to contain the Frasier branding.
Although no official explanation has been given concerning Einhorn’s lack of involvement, co-showrunner Joe Cristalli previously claimed that “the role we created wasn’t necessarily the same Freddy we originally saw.”
Yeah, that’s a problem.
And throwaway lines that totally alter the show’s history won’t smooth things over, either. Fans are well aware of what happened in past episodes of Frasier, even if they mostly use them to fall asleep to.
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