Kelsey Grammer wants more Frasier, and he wants Ted Danson to be a part of it.
“Ted and I might actually visit something together, we’ve been talking about it,” Grammer recently revealed to the New York Post. “A couple ideas, maybe on Frasier. We don’t know, but there is still certainly something, some fields to be mined there, in terms of that relationship, as long as it’s still a relevant relationship it’s still relevant for the show.”
Grammer and Danson first co-starred on the beloved sitcom Cheers, with Danson portraying bartender Sam Malone and Grammer incarnating the Frasier Crane character he’d spin off into Frasier. The pair didn’t speak for nearly 30 years after Cheers bowed in 1993, but now that they’ve patched things up, Grammer is eager to collaborate again.
One problem that stands in their way is the fact that Paramount+ recently canceled the Frasier revival that they first greenlit in 2023.
The Frasier revival brought the debonair psychiatrist back to his Cheers stomping ground of Boston, swapping out Crane brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Frasier’s radio show engineer Roz (Peri Gilpin), and live-in Crane caretaker Daphne (Jane Leeves) for the good doctor’s estranged son (Jack Cutmore-Scott), his quirky love interest (Jess Salguiero), and Frasier’s new colleagues at Harvard (Nicholas Lyndhurst and Toks Olagundoye).
Paramount provided a home for the revival for two seasons, but Grammer believes he can find better accommodations. “There’s a better home for it…. I mean, obviously, they didn’t really promote or spend much time on it,” he said. “We’ll end up somewhere where people are passionate about it…. Listen, it’s got a huge audience, a big following, and if people know where to find it, I think they will.”
Chris Haston/Paramount+
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There seems to be no hope for Grammer and Danson’s original series, however. “Cheers will not come back, [co-creator] Jimmy Burrows has always said, ‘No, that bar doesn’t exist anymore,'” Grammer said.
Grammer is interested in other Cheers stars returning for a possible Frasier revival season 3, following the previous appearances of Gilpin’s Roz and Bebe Neuwirth‘s Lilith. The star said he “would like to see Diane come back,” referring to Shelley Long‘s beloved Cheers waitress, who dates both Frasier and Sam over the course of the series.
Reflecting on his reported fallout with Danson, Grammer said, “It got a little blown out of proportion. It really wasn’t an argument. It was at a time in my life when I was actually going through a lot of self-doubt, self-loathing, honestly…. It was when I was drinking a lot. Ted had just come up and said, ‘You know, I’m kind of mad at you that sometimes you don’t show up ready to go.'”
“Maybe what happened for Ted was, he stepped away from what might have been a better friendship. Maybe he had to protect himself,” Grammer continued.
Danson reprised his Cheers role on a season 2 episode of Frasier, meaning the characters have their own three-decade span of silence to navigate, should they get the opportunity to meet on screen again.