Critic’s Rating: 3 / 5.0
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What is it with Spanish ham on TV right now?
We’ve just seen “before” and “after” versions of this Iberian delicacy on the new season of Only Murders in the Building, and here we are now with the Frasier Season 2 premiere getting in on the porcine action.
It’s a bold move to call an episode “Ham” and then completely live up to that name by filling it with subplots that could be trimmed.
Sophomore Year At Harvard
The revival’s first season was surprisingly good, especially considering the perfection of Frasier, The Original Series.
Frasier 2.0 fleshed out Dr. Crane’s return to Boston with “new” characters from his previous academic life there rather than his Cheers era.
This strategy worked incredibly well, particularly in the character of David Crane, the son of Daphne and Niles, who was now a freshman at Harvard. Anders Keith was a revelation as this character, whose kooky fustiness was a pitch-perfect blend of his parents’ quirks.
Frasier’s challenge for its second season was how to create and maintain narrative tension now that all of this place setting was complete.
Perhaps the show relaxed a little too much into its success because this episode feels like a midseason filler rather than a high-stakes premiere.
On the one hand, it was refreshing to have the show’s second season just start without a recap info dump. On the other hand, it went straight to a sight-gag-heavy episode that felt completely divorced from the previous season.
Squealing Through Customs
Frasier and Professor Alan Cornwall’s purchase of (and planned party for) an expensive Spanish ham was exactly the kind of highbrow caper that the brothers Crane would get into all too often back in Seattle.
Here, it was explained as a way for Frasier and his old friend to honor their long-ago trip to Spain during their Oxford days, but it really seemed more like an excuse for Frasier to create the unofficial holiday of “Ham Day” and throw a little money around.
The original series had many beloved episodes of pure farce, like The Ski Lodge and The Seal Who Came To Dinner. Although never my favorites, they at least featured masterful physical comedy and timing.
But when the hapless David Crane was put in charge of ham party preparation, his predictable hash of the job lacked surprise or inventiveness.
That highlights how different David’s character seems now compared to last season. He was an accident-prone goof, but there was a confident grace to his movements, timing, and line delivery that is missing from a premiere that could sorely use it.
The secondary storylines here weren’t much better.
Not The Best Use Of Time
Frasier became angry at his old best friend and his son when he learned that Freddy had asked Alan for advice about dropping out of Harvard and not him.
It got worse when Olivia and Freddy discovered that the life-changing advice Alan gave them years ago came not from the professor’s own experience and wisdom but from the Enchanted Snookerball (i.e., Magic 8 Ball) he kept in his desk drawer.
Olivia’s outsized reaction to learning that her life could’ve involved marriage to a tech billionaire was mostly played for broad laughs. Still, Freddy’s literal shrug at how his fate was decided seemed low-key even for him.
So far in the revival, Freddy’s character has been a tricky balancing act. He never seems entirely believable as either a salt-of-the-earth firefighter or a brilliant Harvard dropout.
However, I am totally behind him being a no-regrets firefighter if that means we’ll get more scenes of scout groups visiting the firehouse.
The best part of the episode was just a bunch of kids around a table. Somehow, they unexpectedly dominated the action.
They asked Freddy every pertinent question that he already should have totally asked himself about his part in the situation with Frasier and Alan, and they did it with perfect timing and delivery.
These scout group kids rocked, and even the Dalmatian puppy in the corner was like, “Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to be pulling focus here!”
A Question Of Facts
In a sub-sub-sub plot, Eve got insulted when Frasier mocked her offer to take sangria to the ham party. She became incensed when she arrived to discover that he had provided his own upscale version of the drink.
However, Frasier and Alan’s account of their “ham origin story” presented an even deeper Spanish-themed mystery.
The old friends say they were separated from their Oxford tour bus group and wandered around lost, buying espadrilles and battling ibexes until they came upon a remote tavern where they had their first delicious taste of Spanish ham.
They also said their wallets were stolen before the bill came, so they ended up calling their parents, who paid for their dinner.
Much of this seemed super odd to me in terms of Frasier canon.
First, I had to double-check when Frasier’s mother passed away. That happened in 1987, during the Cheers timeline, so she’d indeed have been alive during her son’s Oxford-era sojourn.
Frasier’s undergraduate degree was at Harvard, but it’s unclear if he attended Oxford College before, during, or after his time at Harvard Medical School. Still, he was probably in his mid-to-late twenties when he was at Oxford and on that Spanish trip.
I would believe their story more if they had only called Alan’s parents, who I assume were in England, rather than saying they also called Frasier’s parents, who were several more timezones away in Seattle.
More importantly, at this point in history (i.e., the early ’80s), it was not the norm to pay for anything over the phone. Traveler’s cheques were used when traveling internationally, and credit cards had raised numbers that needed to be run over carbon paper to be legitimate.
Unless young Frasier and Alan’s parents were actually on this trip with them and waiting by the phone at the Oxford group’s hotel, there is no way they could have performed the feat of paying for their sons’ dinner from outside the country in under a week’s time.
Before you ask, there actually isn’t a more appropriate show to be this nitpicky about than Frasier, either the Original or Crispy versions.
I’m not fact-checking all the vintages of wine and sherry on both shows over the years (at least not here!); I’m just noting some discrepancies in this particular episode that really rang hollow for long-time viewers.
Looking Ahead
By the end, Frasier and Alan were friends again, Freddy has apologized to everyone for his cluelessness, and Eve, David, and Olivia remained the comic relief.
Still, everything about this episode raises red flags for the season to come. The quality of writing, directing, scene blocking, and camera movement are greatly diminished from Season 1.
It hurts to see such long-beloved characters in sub-par circumstances. Season 1 of the Frasier revival was a quiet miracle of ingenuity, but if Frasier Season 2 Episode 1 is any indication, this might be the true end of an era.
TV Fanatics, how do you feel about the premiere?
Do you think Frasier Season 2 has any hope of matching the quality of Season 1?
Let us know what you think in the comments!