WHAT TO BINGE ON TV

Stream On: What’s old is new—can you go home again? Two reboots

By Peter Hummers on October 19, 2023

Frasier and Justified return to television with new seasons in 2023.

NPR reported in August 2022 that in the U.S., streaming captured 34.8% of TV viewership in July, while cable accounted for 34.4% and broadcast TV came in third at 21.6%. With streaming services like Paramount+ producing their own shows there are more opportunities for every kind of programming—including reboots.

FRASIER

/Streaming /🍅57%🍟87% /Trailer /2023 /TV14

“I have reconnected with the hoi-polloi!”

Thirty years ago, Dr. Frasier Crane moved from Boston where he had been a character in Cheers to Seattle to star in his own sitcom, which would run for 11 seasons, win 37 Emmys and be recognized as one of the best sitcoms of all time. This year he returns to Boston … 19 years later.

Joe Cristalli, co-creator of Kelsey Grammer’s new series on Paramount+, said, “I just don’t think it is a reboot because really, Frasier was a spinoff of Cheers. This is kind of just a spinoff of Frasier that we’re calling Frasier. This is his third act. Frasier going to a new place with all new characters in an all-new setting.” James Burrows, co-creator of Cheers, has directed the first two episodes.

I must admit I approach these revisitations with some trepidation: in this case Frasier was one of the greatest sitcoms ever, and rewatching it recently only confirmed that. The original series has aged very well, its star Kelsey Grammer subsequently showing up in 30 Rock, playing himself, carried around in a sedan chair by servants like the show-business god that he is. Now he’s older than John Mahoney, who played Frasier’s father, was at the end of the original show. (Mahoney died in 2018.)

So: 2023. Accompanied by his nephew, David (Anders Keith), who was born to Frasier’s brother Niles and his wife Daphne in the original show’s finale, Frasier Crane returns to Boston after his father’s funeral to give a guest lecture at Harvard University as a favor to an old college classmate of his, Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst). David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles, wasn’t interested in “repeating the performance,” Grammer told CNN, and Jane Leeves, who played Daphne, is unavailable, busy on The Resident.

While in town, he drops in on his son, Frederick, now (incredibly) a Boston firefighter (maybe not so incredibly—his grandfather Martin had been a policeman), and Freddy’s roommate, Eve.

It’s at first a little uncomfortable—the new characters don’t seem as if they belong with Frasier, but then it is a new “act” in his life. David does recall Niles more and more as the show goes on. Bebe Neuwirth as Frasier’s wife Lilith Sternin, and Peri Gilpin, as Frasier’s friend and producer Roz, will return. The writing also shows promise: “You know what they say—a ‘no’ is just a ‘yes’ in a trench coat.”

By the end of the first episode I was on board. On Rotten Tomatoes, 54% of 48 critics’ reviews are positive, while 87% of the audience polled enjoyed it. The website’s consensus reads: “With Kelsey Grammer safely back in the role he was born to play, Frasier scores as comfort viewing even if it can’t quite compare to the classic original series.”

JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL

/Streaming /🍅91%🍟49% /Trailer /2023 /TVMA

Justified is a little different story: It’s only been eight years since it left the air, the show is still popular streaming, and the series was lighter in tone than Frasier. Oddly, I mean, for a hard-core, violent police procedural as opposed to a domestic sitcom, but there it is.

And apart for some grey hair, Tim Olyphant (Deadwood) is still the unflappable but cheerfully trigger-happy Raylan Givens that he always was. Raylan was a recurring character in Elmore Leonard’s canon since 1993, a young but old-school U.S. Marshall complete with Stetson hat based in Miami. Justified was based on Leonard’s novel Fire in the Hole (2001), where Givens is sent under a cloud to his hometown in Kentucky after he first, gave a gunman 24 hours to get out of Miami, and then, shot and killed said gunman in a forced exchange that Givens maintained was “justified.”

Justified: City Primeval is a treatment of an Elmore Leonard “Raymond Cruz” novel, 1980’s City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, which was altered to feature Raylan Givens. Raymond Cruz here is a secondary character, played by Paul Calderón (Bosch, East New York), who originally played him in Out of Sight, another Leonard treatment from 1998. (I think we can expect to see more of Raymond Cruz in future series.)

Raylan, back in Miami in 2023, takes his fifteen-year-old daughter Willa (Olyphant’s daughter Vivian) to a camp after repeated disciplinary problems, and a pair of criminals try to steal his car. He subdues them but misses Willa’s camp deadline, forcing him to take her along while he extradites the men to their hometown, Detroit, where he soon becomes involved with sociopath Clement Mansell, the “Oklahoma Wildman.” It’s a good eight-episode “season,” officially a limited miniseries, with a typical Raylan Givens mixing it up with typical Elmore Leonard characters, and I’m sure that future miniseries, with Olyphant and/or Calderón, will be well-received. The professional critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads “Timothy Olyphant’s quickdraw charm shows no signs of dulling in City Primeval, an introspective and very welcome return for Raylan Givens.”

(Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon’s prices.)

Click here for more Stream On: What to watch on TV columns by Pete Hummers. Columns are archived and updated when necessary on Substack.

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