‘Frasier’ sets Season 2 premiere date on Paramount+

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The Frasier revival will launch its second season on Sept. 19, Paramount+ has announced.

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Two episodes premiere that day on the streaming platform, followed by weekly instalments on Thursdays.

Kelsey Grammer will resume his role as Dr. Frasier Crane. Other cast members — including Jack Cutmore-Scott, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Toks Olagundoye, Jess Salgueiro and Anders Keith — will also be back.

Peri Gilpin, who played Roz in the original Frasier series and the reboot, will return in a recurring guest star role. The rest of the guest-star roster includes Rachel Bloom, Yvette Nicole Brown, Patricia Heaton and Amy Sedaris.

The season will also feature Frasier returning to Seattle for an episode, reuniting with Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert), Bulldog Briscoe (Dan Butler), and Bebe Glazer (Harriet Sansom Harris).

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The long-gestating reboot launched last fall and saw Grammer reprising his role as the lovable Dr. Frasier Crane – a role he first played on Cheers before leading his own eponymous spinoff from 1993-2004.

The original Frasier still holds the record for most Emmy wins for a comedy series with 37 wins and 107 nominations.

Last November, Grammar said the distinct humour that was a hallmark on the original series, which ran on NBC for 11 seasons, came at a time when “the world (needed) a laugh.”

“People are in the mood to laugh at themselves. People want to be able to laugh a little bit and just sit back and enjoy yourselves and think, ‘Oh, television is a wonderful place to spend a little bit of time and drop some of this other stuff for a while.’ It’s probably needed a bit more right now,” he told Postmedia at the time.

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The new Frasier follows Grammar’s titular character as he returns to his old stomping grounds in Boston in hopes of mending his relationship with his grown-up son Freddy (Cutmore-Scott), whom he shares with his ex-wife Lilith Sternin (Neuwirth), and nephew David (Keith).

An old pal from his school days, Alan (Lyndhurst), convinces him to try his hand at teaching, and Frasier soon embarks on his third act.

Frasier was initially only set to appear in a four-episode story arc when he was introduced as the obnoxious boyfriend to Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) in the Season 3 Cheers premiere back in September 1984. But Grammer suggested audiences embraced him and turned him into one of television’s best-loved characters because they were able to see themselves in the character.

“I think he reminds people of themselves a lot — that feeling of, ‘I’m out of my depth,’” Grammer said. “But they’re safe with Frasier. When I first read the part, it seemed the only way to play him was to have him be in love with Diane with all his being. So that when they broke up, the pain that came with that made him funny. He cared so deeply, but people knew it wasn’t going to work out.”

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