by Chris Snelgrove
| Published
In the final months of December, I found myself engaging in my usual holiday tradition of watching Christmas episodes of my favorite sitcoms. Thanks to Hulu's curation of holiday episodes (why are they the only major streamers doing this?), it was easy to find the right ones, and I ended up watching all of them. FreezerChristmas episodes. It was better than I remembered, but like Lilith's arrival at a birthday party, there's one thing that spoiled my enjoyment: remember that Freezer Reboots are relatively bad and may be the best example of bad TV being revived.
Fraser reboot plot
If you haven't had the dubious pleasure of trying Freezer Reboot yourself, here's the rundown: We open with our titular character at a crossroads after his father dies, Charlotte leaves him, and his talk show Dr. Phil-esque. He decided to start over, returning to Boston to begin a new teaching position at Harvard while rekindling his relationship with his son. However, everything, from his difficulties settling into the new job and finding a common culture with his firefighter son, serves as a constant reminder that although Frasier has gotten older, he has not necessarily grown wiser.
Why is it bad?
With that summary out of the way faster than Eddie ran out of the bathroom, why do I think… Freezer Is reboot the ultimate example of reviving bad TV? The first and probably the main reason is that the revival's main cast is missing literally all of the ensemble characters that made the original show such a success. The returning characters are mostly distributed as small cameos, leaving the audience with a new cast of characters that aren't as entertaining or compelling as the previous set.
This is not the fault of the actors. The cast is generally talented, but original Freezer Writer Ken Levine explained at Hollywood & Levine that there is no real connection between the characters in the reboot except for his son and Fraser himself. This includes fellow Harvard professor Alan Cornwall, who is supposedly his “best friend” but is “not once referenced” in Cheers or Freezer. That's a great point, and the longer he talks, the more I realize that it's the many problems with the show's characters that continue to unravel (in both narrative and comedy) what could have been an excellent reboot.
Levine's breakdown also includes Eve, a new mother living with Frasier's son in the reboot after the death of her firefighter boyfriend. Levine points out that we should ask ourselves an important question regarding her character's story: “What does this have to do with Frasier?” He then asked if it was possible for him to “lose that character” before emphatically answering his own question: “It definitely can.”
The last Frasier reboot character that Levine focused on was Olivia Finch, the dean of Frasier at Harvard who is very eager to hire a major celebrity to teach at the university. The writer posed the big question: When it comes to a university as prestigious as Harvard, “what do they give a f***” to hire famous faculty, something that only matters to “a very small college, some of which are manufactured Middlebury.” Her fascination with prestige also Celebrity makes it difficult to answer “what is her role?” when it comes to controlling Fraser.
It's actually getting better
Reading his thoughts felt like a revelation. Honestly, I felt a bit like Frasier himself because I was internally upset about the new series, and Levin like Martin came over to talk to me in a frank way. A group offer is, by definition, nothing Without its characters, and Freezer The reboot was always going to succeed or fail based on the strength of its characters. But in comparison to the old Freezer As for the new reboot, it's easy to see that the new show's characters were failures on all fronts.
However, every FreezerThe reboot's missteps didn't stop it from getting a second season, and this season (to be fair) managed to improve on its existing characters while bringing back original fan-favorite Roz Doyle. While the first season was the ultimate example of a bad TV revival, with the second season it feels like the show is finally heading (albeit very slowly, and still with somewhat dated characters) in the right direction. This leaves us with an ethics worthy of a classic Freezer Christmas Episode: It's never too late for even the worst of us to work on becoming better.
