Kelsey Grammer Has Been Synonymous with Frasier Crane for 40 Years — and He’s Already Eyeing 50
Pro tip: always keep your head up when walking onto a studio lot.
I learned this the hard way when I attended a taping of the "Frasier" revival on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles over the summer. Looking down to consult my map, I almost walked directly into the path of a cyclist whipping between the soundstages. When I jumped out of the way, I realized it was none other Kelsey Grammer . What better way to get the blood flowing than biking around in full costume an hour before reporting to work?
Walking out of the taping, all I could say was that the biking is paying off. At 69 years old, Grammer is as full of life as ever. Even if reactions to the first season of the reboot were mixed , everyone seemed to agree that Grammer hasn't lost a step when it comes to playing Dr. Frasier Crane. Watching him shift between farcical snobbery and overly dramatic proclamations of victimhood made it feel like we never said goodbye to our favorite radio psychiatrist in the first place. As Grammer tells it, slipping back into the character after a two decade hiatus was as easy as catching up with an old friend over lunch.
"It was pretty effortless," Grammer said during a recent conversation with IndieWire. "I mean, he's a sort of co-created creature of my imagination and of a writer's imagination, several writers. The best of them, of course, sort of align with my imagination about the character. And it's pretty simple. It was pretty simple to get right back into the swing of things and into his rhythm."
The new season is just the latest chapter for one of the most beloved characters in television history. 2024 marks 40 years since Grammer began playing the pretentious psychiatrist, a role that took him through nine seasons of "Cheers," 11 seasons of "Frasier," and even an appearance in an episode of "Wings." While Grammer couldn't have guessed that the character would endure for four decades, he maintains that he knew Frasier Crane was special from the moment he picked up the audition sides.
"I read it and I thought, 'I got this. I got this guy. I know who he is and I'm going to get this part,'" Grammer said of his first audition for the character,. "So I went in and spoke to [casting director Gretchen Rennell] and read through it, went on camera, and I realized that at that point, this was going to be something that could be really remarkable. And as it turned out, of course, I got to do it. And as I got to do it, it just became more evident that he was an extraordinary character."
Grammer's presence on "Cheers" only grew, but when the show ended in 1993, he figured he was saying goodbye to Dr. Crane forever. He had already signed a deal with Paramount to lead another sitcom in which he would play a business mogul who was forced to run his business empire from a hospital bed after a debilitating accident. But even in the golden age of cheesy multi-camera sitcoms, the silly idea was a bridge too far.
"John Pike read the script, who was the president of Paramount Television at the time, and he took me to dinner. I looked at him and I said, 'Well, did you read the script?' He says, 'Yep.' And he looked at me, he said, 'Kelsey, I think a sitcom should be funny,'" Grammer said with a laugh, noting that the rejection quickly paved the way for a much better idea. "[Pike] said, 'I want you to play Frasier again.'"
That serendipitous conversation led to one of the great spin-offs in TV history. Grammer famously insisted on differentiating "Frasier" from its predecessor, moving the setting across the country to avoid forced encounters with "Cheers" characters and allowing Frasier to be divorced without custody of his son as mechanism to force him into more adult-oriented plotlines. Before long, Dr. Crane was surrounded with an incredible entourage of supporting characters from his new radio career at Seattle's KACL.
The first season of the "Frasier" reboot followed the same spirit of differentiation, moving Frasier back to Boston and largely focusing on new supporting characters like his adult son Freddie (played by a re-cast Jack Cutmore-Scott) and his Oxford buddy Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst). But Season 2 sees Dr. Crane reconnecting with more of his old friends. When Harriet Sansom Harris reprised her role as Frasier's conniving agent Bebe Glazer , the electricity on the soundstage was electric — even if she made Grammer break with laughter more than a few times.
"Well, funny thing is they're just as good as they always were," Grammer said of bringing his old co-stars back into the fold. "I mean, Harriet Harris is an old friend of mine. We went to school together. We've known each other since we were 18 years old, and she has always been that funny. She's an extraordinary person and the love for that character is profound. When the audience heard that she was, I just said, 'Bebe Glazer,' and the audience just exploded with approbation. It was really fun to see. We'll try to have other characters like that on the show, but it's been magnificent to visit them again."
While Grammer is thrilled to see beloved supporting characters from the original show return (this season also features appearances from the likes of Dan Butler's Bulldog Briscoe and Edward Hibbert's Gil Chesterton), he continues to embrace the challenge of adding new creative wrinkles to an iconic formula. More than anything, he's thrilled that his character has matured enough to solve problems instead of just creating them.
"Frasier was always a bit of a buffoon. In many of the storylines that we did previously, Frasier would come out just a bit under underappreciated, let's say, or just under fully incapable of understanding how to resolve something, more of a victim," he said. "What's interesting about [reboot showrunners Joe Cristalli and Chris Harris], they've written about three shows now where Frasier's in a bit of a conundrum and he sits back for a second and he's capable of solving the problem. And I like that about him. I like that they're writing that way for him, for Frasier now. So Frasier has actually evolved into a person who can actually take charge of a situation and succeed in it. And that's a new note for Frasier, which has been really fun."
The longevity of Frasier Crane has taken him from a supporting character in an '80s NBC sitcom to the lead in perhaps the quintessential '90s show, to the star of a streaming project. Grammer admits that he's still figuring out the quirks of the streaming business, but he's eager to keep playing Dr. Crane for as long as his Paramount+ patrons will have him. If he gets his way, we could be in for another decade-long run that gets him to the half century mark.
"The new streaming sort of world that we're in now, you don't really know who's in charge. And you can't quite figure out why they call a shot or why they don't call a shot," Grammer said. "So the only thing I could really surrender to is the idea that I was making a good television show and one that people would want to see more of, and hopefully that's what will sustain us for the next decade. I mean, I fully intend to do another decade of this."
The first two episodes of "Frasier" Season 2 are now streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes releasing weekly.
