JAN MOIR: What did they do with Frasier, the best sitcom ever made? No Niles or Roz. And Rodders from Only Fools as a professor at Harvard…

Deep in the darkness of a Soho screening theater in London, I watch a preview of the new Frasier show through my fingers. Why? Because I can barely bear to look. Will it be terrible? Is it going to be great? Will it be a pale imitation of the greatness that came before it?

There are millions of viewers around the world who believe Frasier was perhaps the best sitcom ever, and I’m one of them. During the eleven years the series ran, from 1993 to 2004, Frasier was easily one of the funniest, smartest, most perfectly drawn and hilariously scripted television shows of all time.

Set in Seattle, it features a ship full of lovable fools, played by a perfect cast, with a loving but fractured family dynamic at its core. There was Frasier himself, the pretentious psychiatrist and radio host, played by the great Kelsey Grammer. Then there was his equally pretentious psychiatrist brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) and their salty father, retired police officer Martin Crane (John Mahoney).

Support came from Martin’s caregiver Daphne (Jane Leeves), man-hungry radio producer Roz (Peri Gilpin) and Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth). Everyone was funny. Even Martin’s dog, Eddie, was funny.

I still fondly remember classic episodes like The Ski Lodge – 22 minutes of pure, delicious farce – and The Innkeepers, in which Frasier and Niles buy a fancy restaurant where they argue over the soufflés and flambé the Cherries Jubilee, with predictable implications.

There might even be some hearty laughter during a mundane discussion between the Crane brothers about the price increase despite the lack of pistachios in the biscotti at Cafe Nervosa.

“Less nuts, more money – something I’ve been striving for my entire professional life,” Frasier bellows, a phrase that might not pass muster in these gray days of wokeness and hurt feelings.

Is that a reason why Frasier should have been left alone, with his magic safely stored in our collective memory banks? Too late. A brand new Frasier starts streaming on Paramount+ next week and there’s no turning back.

In the opening scenes, Frasier complains to his old university friend Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst) about the lack of female company they had to endure all those years ago while studying at Oxford for their English degrees. “The only women we could hang out with were the Bronte Sisters,” he bellows, which made me laugh. And, most importantly, it gave me hope.

For these reboots of once-popular television series, these reruns that tap into our nostalgic affection for the familiar and the cozy are almost always a mistake. Over the years, revamped versions of popular television series like Dallas, The Bionic Woman, Charlie’s Angels and Gossip Girl have all flopped miserably.

The BBC’s 2015 revival of Poldark, starring Aidan Turner as the delightful Cornishman, was an honorable exception to the rule, becoming a bigger success than the 1975 original.

More typical is a recent reboot of Sex And The City, a cynical and sad exercise in creative defeatism that failed to match the energy and enthusiasm of the original.

As the great Dr. Frasier Crane himself once said, perhaps wearing his breakfast jacket as he played the piano and reflected over a bracing mid-morning glass of sherry in his modest Seattle penthouse: “It may be an unwise man who does not learn from his own mistakes, but he is an absolute idiot who does not learn from those of others.’ And now this.

The new show finds Frasier back on America’s East Coast – through two profitable decades as a television star in Chicago – and he seems a little more relaxed than before, unusually willing to adapt to his surroundings. “What is it about the city of Boston that makes me want to give up the pleasures of the fermented grape?” he says in the first episode, abandoning his beloved sherry for a glass of beer.

This is one of many Easter eggs sown during the new show; the jokes and throwbacks that reference Frasier’s complicated backwoods. The beer was a reference to Cheers, the original Boston bar sitcom in which the character Frasier first appeared in 1984. Grammer’s Dr Crane appeared in the third series and remained there for many years, before becoming a spin-off character with his own hit series.

The question is: can the magic happen again? To be fair, the show’s producers, including Grammer himself, ask a lot of the audience; perhaps more than any audience would be willing to give.

For starters, there are two hurdles for Frasier fans to overcome. One is that Frasier himself is the only major recurring character other than his son Frederick, but even he is played by a different actor (the deeply depressed Jack Cutmore-Scott) now that he’s an adult.

Daphne, Roz, and Lilith will all make cameo appearances, but there’s no Niles, which is a disaster. No Niles! We’re talking Hardy without his Laurel, Seinfeld without George, a fish out of water without his chips on both shoulders.

David Hyde Pierce, the actor who played the neurotic Niles so brilliantly, apparently had no interest in returning to the role.

A shame, because his way of delivering a line was peerless. In an old episode, Frasier tries to reassure his younger brother of his love for him. “I’d shave my head for you,” he says. “A gesture that becomes less important every year,” Niles replies, beading Frasier’s receding hairline.

Replacing Niles is David (Anders Keith), Niles and Daphne’s son, who is just camp and confused and kind of a weak spot in the new setup. John Mahoney, who played patriarch Martin Crane, died in 2018 and at the end of the first episode there is a moving tribute to him that, I must confess, made me cry.

The neighborhood bar in the new series is also called Mahoney’s Tavern, a nice touch. His spirit also lives on in the character of Frederick, a firefighter who inherits much of his grandfather’s peppery aversion to fantasy and fuss.

The mutually annoying but essentially loving relationship between Frasier and Martin lives on between Frasier and Frederick.

Secondly – ​​and this is the most important – the British public must somehow understand that Rodney Trotter from Only Fools And Horses is now Frasier’s best friend. Not only that, he’s a Harvard professor, complete with a lavish vocabulary and a penchant for expensive whiskeys.

Nicholas Lyndhurst is doing his best and perhaps in time Rodders’ shadow will fade, like the elbows on his tweed jackets.

His boss Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the chair of Harvard’s psychology department, treats him with energetic contempt. “The only woman on your arm would be someone putting on a blood pressure cuff,” she tells him.

Yes, there are signs of life – despite the fact that the younger members of the cast just aren’t funny and Frasier is the only truly comedic character, a star instead of being what he should be; part of a great ensemble. And is it just me or are there any worrying signs of him becoming flabby in old age?

“If there’s anything I ever wanted to be in my life, more than anything, it’s to be a good father,” he bluffs to Freddy at one point. In another scene, he urges a young mother not to blink and miss the day you held your child in your arms and rocked them to sleep.

How you long for Roz to tell him to stop being a “tit” or “a big rug” and get himself together. But above all: how you long for Niles.