Peter Fincham welcomes the rebooted US series and asks what British sitcoms you’d like to be given a refresh

After a gap of nearly 20 years, Frasier is back. Kelsey Grammer was 49 when he stopped playing the bumptious psychiatrist Frasier Crane. He’s 68 now but looks pretty good on it and judging by the first few episodes, there’s plenty of gas left in the tank.

There’s a multitude of ways in which you can make a mess of a revival and the new Frasier (Paramount +) has apparently managed to sidestep them all. In place of Frasier’s brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) we have his son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) who dropped out of Harvard in order to become a Boston fire-fighter.

Frasier himself, after a long and slightly demeaning career fronting a daytime TV show, has returned to his alma mater to lecture. He therefore moves in with Freddy, who is gay, and Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro) who agrees to keep up the pretence of being the mother of his son.

Frasier’s snobbery and petty intolerance makes him a tough flatmate for anyone to put up with, and the return to academia doesn’t go well either. In the third episode he comes home exhausted and frankly admits it isn’t working out at Harvard. This is a cue for his son to rehearse all the arguments his father threw at him when Freddy decided to give up, culminating in, “What am I going to tell my friends?!” It’s a masterpiece of comic writing.

The new cast is uniformly excellent, and there’s even the unlikely figure of Nicholas Lyndhurst as Frasier’s old friend Alan Cornwall, an indolent British academic who responds to any suggestion that he’s coasting complacently towards retirement by muttering the word “tenure”.

I was a bit worried about Lyndhurst at first – he’s dressed in that ridiculous old-fogey way Americans imagine that British academics favour – but the ghost of Rodders soon fades and Lyndhurst knows exactly how to supply the comic foil to a star performance.

Frasier has always been unlikely mainstream fair – a psychiatrist with a penchant for intellectual snobbery, formerly in Seattle, now in Boston, a thousand miles from middle America where mass audiences can be found – but it slips down as easily as one of the fine whiskies that Crane and “Corny” like to drink, seemingly at all times of day.

Watching it in 2023 doesn’t just recall Frasier at its peak, it’s also a reminder of the heyday of the great American sitcom.

And what a heyday it was. Between 1993 and 2004 they knocked off no fewer than 264 episodes of Frasier, itself a spinoff from Cheers, which weighed in with 273. Not far behind and running at broadly the same time, Friends managed 236. Truly, this was the industrial age of American situation comedy. Henry Ford would have been proud.

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewing Griff Rhys Jones for the series Jon Plowman and I present on Radio 4, What’s Funny About? (all episodes available on BBC Sounds, if you’re interested), about the hugely successful sketch show Smith and Jones. We’d previously talked to the makers of similar programmes – The Fast Show, Smack the Pony, Not the Nine O’Clock News – and reflected on the fact that they rarely get beyond three or four series before the cast and producers go their separate ways.

Smith and Jones, unusually, continued for 11 series in all (the first four were called Alas Smith and Jones), and I wanted to ask Griff whether he ever thought it was running out of steam.

Griff was refreshingly honest, agreeing that he and Mel Smith worried about repeating themselves, but then made the point that ending things early was a peculiarly British habit. As an example, Not the Nine O’Clock News, where Griff and Mel first worked together, started in 1979 and ended in 1982, whereas Saturday Night Live started in 1975 and is still going today. Good point, Griff.

What are the reasons for this massive difference in both productivity and longevity? Some of the most iconic British comedies are striking for their short lifespans, obvious examples being Fawlty Towers (two series of six episodes each) and The Office (two series of six plus a two-part Christmas special).

Money’s a big issue of course. When the US networks were all-powerful they were able to write the cheques that kept the talent keen. Huge teams of writers were on hand to ensure every joke was a zinger. Actors were kept under option for years and paid eye-watering sums to stay on board.

But it’s hard not to conclude that culturally, that peculiarly British attitude to success – let’s not outstay our welcome, time to move on – is also a factor. I asked Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan (who admittedly hail from America and Ireland respectively, but work within the British system), might they bring Catastrophe back at some point?

“What if we made a mess of it?” asked Sharon.

“You could have said the same thing between series 1 and series 2,” I replied.

No doubt Kelsey Grammer and his team of producers and writers were aware of the risks when they took the plunge. I’m glad they ignored them. The rebooted Frasier is a treat, and personally I’m in for as many episodes as they can bear to make.

And meanwhile, any suggestions for British sitcoms we can dust off and bring back? There must be a few out there.

Frasier starts 12 October on Paramount +

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

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