Tossed salad and scrambled eggs

They're callin' again

© 2018 Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license

The “Frasier” revival has officially been ordered at Paramount Plus.

Original series star Kelsey Grammer will return in the title role in addition to executive producing...

“Having spent over 20 years of my creative life on the Paramount lot, both producing shows and performing in several, I’d like to congratulate Paramount+ on its entry into the streaming world,” said Grammer. “I gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.” — Variety, Feb. 24

In this new series, Fraiser Crane is a successful podcaster and YouTuber who has returned to the Pacific Northwest after a year and a half in Russia, where Roz Doyle took him to seek an alternative treatment for cachexia, which he developed from a fad diet of cornish game hens in pomegranate sauce. Frasier’s treatment by a comical Cossack quack played by Brian Blessed put him in a coma, and his reawakening and rehabilitation by an Athonite monk played by Kevin Sorbo accounts for his absence. Roz has meanwhile gone on the lam with money she stole from Frasier while he was unconscious.

Crane returns to a pandemic-ravaged Seattle, but since he can do his shows from his apartment, and Le Cigare Volant and Café Nervosa deliver, this is not an issue. His father has died, but Frasier now shares the apartment with Bulldog, who has grown a huge beard, gained a hundred pounds, and become a Three Percenter on the run from the FBI for his role in the January 6 Capitol attack. Like the late Martin Crane, Bulldog sometimes scoffs at Frasier’s elegant tastes.

Frasier mines Bulldog for material as he struggles to regain his audience after the long absence. His pre-Russia material relied on an intellectual approach in which Frasier used classical references to show how far society had fallen since the advent of modernism, and listeners called in to get berated by him for their lack of values. (The show’s catch phrase was “I’m Dr. Frasier Crane and I’m judging.”) He often ended these shows with jazz improvisations on voice and piano, usually on the theme of “tossed salad and scrambled eggs” and, increasingly toward the end, “cornish game hens in pomegranate sauce.”

But in the 2021 media environment, Frasier finds himself outmoded and mocked by young conservatives looking for a more visceral experience. Assisted by Bulldog and his brother Niles, who has converted to Sufism and become a theocon (and divorced by Daphne, who has moved to Portland to join Rose City Antifa), Frasier cooks up a new persona: Rough-hewn “Doc Frasier, Professor of Pussy,” who claims to have had a conversion experience in Russia where he realized Julia Wilcox had been leading him on all along and when he agreed to that sexual harassment training session “I lost my balls, and it took a whole lot of fuckin’ and fightin’ to get them back.” He now berates listeners for not being sufficiently vulgar and aggressive, and instead of jazz his show ends with a young white rapper named Poopmouth performing “Suck my Dick Julia Wilcox.”

The producer of “Doc Frasier, Professor of Pussy” is also a blast from the past: Roseanne Barr as Karen, a foul-mouthed firebrand who not only mans the mixer but is Bulldog’s “old lady.”