Kelsey Grammer, best known for his portrayal of Dr. Frasier Crane in the '80s sitcom Cheers and in the '90s Frasier may be reprising his role. This is sending liberals in a panic, worried that it would become, “a white-collar Roseanne motivated by self-righteous white panic.” Because Grammer supported Trump during the election.
Slate staff writer Lili Loofbourow, imagines this new Frasier, which hasn’t even been picked up yet, would be “the grim story of how his son Frederick—a Millennial trapped in a society that no longer offers young generations much in the way of benefits, fair wages, or pensions—would have to move in with his Hannity-watching, Trump-supporting dad.” Frasier, although he flew to Chicago at the end of the series, would movie to “San Francisco, loveless.” San Fransisco “makes escaping the facts of poverty and homelessness impossible no matter how much you pay” and would have sent Frasier “down a long and by now typical slide toward Fox News conservatism.”
After discovering Fox News he would “develop a liking for Sean Hannity, who he’d come to see an unfettered truth-teller against “the elite” and “start resenting immigrants and people of color for small perceived slights.” During its initial run “Frasier was a fairly earnest show that incidentally satirized what conservatives believed liberals to be.” This new one should would be, at least for people Frederick’s age, “the “largely untold American story” of “how right-wing media has transformed so many of their parents into punitive survivalists ready to sacrifice their erstwhile ideals—leaving their bewildered children holding the values their parents once instilled in them.”
Loofbourow wonders who would “want to watch a version of this show where light and comfortable rivalries have since widened into a lacerating ideological distance?” Having a conservative portrayed on television would definitely be the cause of this divide, at least according to liberals who regularly get shows catering towards their views.
