Kelsey Grammer has been reassured that the late John Mahoney would approve of the Frasier reboot.
“I have a lot of pretty ‘airy fairy’ friends, and a lot of them are mediums or spiritualists or whatever,” Grammer, 68, told Entertainment Weekly in a Thursday, November 30, interview. “And I was talking to one of them who said, ‘Oh, by the way, John is very happy about this show.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that.’”
Viewers first met therapist Frasier Crane (Grammer) on the third season of Cheers in 1984. The character remained a familiar face on the CBS series for eight seasons before spinning off as the titular character of his own NBC series, which ran for 11 seasons between 1993 and 2004.
Mahoney portrayed Frasier’s salt-of-the-earth father, who the therapist moves in with upon his post-divorce return to Seattle. The late actor appeared in all 263 episodes of the beloved sitcom, winning two Golden Globes and two Emmys for his role and taking home the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2000 with his fellow castmates.
After Mahoney’s death at age 77 in 2018, speculation about a Frasier reboot began making headlines. When Paramount+ greenlit the series earlier this year, Grammer was clear that the new iteration would honor Mahoney in every way it could.
“There’s a nod to certainly my father in the show, John Mahoney there,” Grammer told Entertainment Tonight in February. “You’ll see things about John all through the show. I think people will be very happy to see that he’s honored in the way he is in the show.”
The rebooted series, which premiered on the streaming platform in October, sees Frasier returning to Boston in an attempt to reconnect with his son (Jack Cutmore-Scott). The new, mellower version of the character, Grammer says, is an homage to Mahoney’s performance.
“He’s a little less goofy about some things. He has certain knowledge now. He’s now his dad,” Grammer explained to EW. “He’s put on the role of his father and that’s new to him, but I think he’s ready for it. And as an homage to John Mahoney and to the role of Martin, we wanted to really include the fact that Frasier was now an orphan. That’s what it comes down to. And now he’s the guy that needs to live up to the role his dad showed him. It’s a nice vibration, and it’s lovely to have John kind of around in our subtext all the time.”
While Mahoney may be ever-present on the reboot, viewers shouldn’t hold their breath for a surprise cameo from any of the other original characters, including Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Daphne (Jane Leeves) and Roz (Peri Gilpin). While Grammer said he initially had “all kinds of creative ideas” for his costars, most of the actors have decided to leave Frasier in the past.
“I thought that I owed it to everybody that was in the previous show, the legacy cast, an opportunity to be in this one, but it just needed to be a different show, a different set of circumstances for all their lives,” Grammer said before revealing that Niles became a professor and Daphne was living in New York in early drafts of the reboot.
“When David and Jane and Peri basically looked like they weren’t going to be part of the show, that’s when Boston came up,” he continued. “That’s when it seemed, ‘Oh, well, Frasier’s got unfinished business to do in Boston. He left with his tail between his legs. He didn’t fulfill his dream there. He didn’t end up conquering the town the way he wanted to. So it’s back to Boston we go.’
