Review of the second season of Frasier – so old-fashioned in places that it makes you dizzy | Frasier

Bwhat's up with all the screen veterans and zeitgeist comedy these days? February brought us the incredibly brilliant final season of Drop It, Larry!, a vehicle for notorious troublemaker Larry David (77 years old). August saw a glorious fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, starring 70-year-old pals Steve Martin (79) and Martin Short (74). Last October, meanwhile, saw the release of the highly anticipated reboot of Frasier, a continuation of the era-defining 90s sitcom starring Kelsey Grammer (now 69 years old).

All three shows are, to some degree, about nostalgia: Curb's final episode was a mischievous nod to the controversial 1998 finale of Seinfeld (which David co-created), while Only Murders inevitably brings back memories of farces from the past thanks to Martin and Short's old-fashioned comedic chops. But both shows also feel decidedly modern: Only Murders is a genre-bending thriller about a true-crime podcaster that knows exactly how to use weird meme humor, while Curb developed a metanaturalism that contemporary comedy still pays attention to today.

The same cannot be said of Frasier 2.0, which revives not only its title character but also the old-fashioned genre of the studio sitcom. In the 20 years since the original ended, shows that featured audience laughter as soundtracks have all but died out — as has the artificiality of the art form's pacing and tone. It's quite baffling to see such old-fashioned television mechanics in the present in the new Frasier, now returning for a second season. In fact, it's enough to give one temporal vertigo: so The That's what it would have been like if there had been smartphones in the 90s!

Even stranger, however, is that the revival of Frasier is proving to be fineFaint praise, but praise nonetheless. And that's despite the show's obvious flaws: a script that groans under the weight of exposition – especially in the first season, when our titular star psychiatrist moves to Boston to be near his estranged son Freddy, a firefighter, and gets a job at the university in the process. Then there's the strange phenomenon of punchlines materializing before the cast has even finished setting up; the humor is, by any standards, simplistic and formulaic.

How and why does it work? Mainly because of the impeccable casting. Grammer is obviously very good in his role as Frasier Crane, who is still a die-hard snob and still looking for love. More surprising is that his new counterpart, work-shy Harvard fellow Alan Cornwall, is played so convincingly by Rodders himself, Nicholas Lyndhurst (a close friend of Grammer's). Alan is both posh and uptight And disillusioned and disobedient: Lyndhurst handles this cartoonish but complex role with aplomb, while Toks Olagundoye works similar wonders as the couple's goofy but bossy department head, Olivia. As Freddy and his girlfriend Eve, Jack Cutmore-Scott and Jess Salgueiro provide enough cool to offset the embarrassment (Anders Keith is also great as David, Frasier's nervous college-bound nephew). The guests are top-notch, too: Season two features Amy Sedaris as a fangirling therapist and Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an obvious Crane clone, while original cast members Peri Gilpin (Roz Doyle) and Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe Glazer) also return.

The other, less inspiring reason for the new Frasier's success is that comedy doesn't have to be good – or clever or fresh – to be funny. Comparing this clumsy replacement show to the original, you might notice that it's less nimble, less sophisticated and less inherently engaging – but it's just as likely to make you laugh. It turns out that even with a relatively low hit rate, relentless quips and unimaginative slapstick scenes still get laughs (I don't want to find David's predictably disastrous attempts to unwrap a prized ham hock funny, but I find them funny anyway).

As is typical of studio sitcoms, the plot doesn't advance much in the second season: Each episode has a superficial plot (Frasier writes a memoir; Frasier plays Cupid; Frasier babysits the kids) with slightly weightier undertones. Frasier is still mostly a cog in an over-the-top dynamic between high culture and popular culture, earlier with his father and later with his son, which means old ground is revisited. The tension between millennials and baby boomers could have been more interesting. In one of the new episodes, Roz convinces exhausted single mother Eve to go out for a night on the town, encouraging her to take up the baton of the endless come-ons that defined the late 20th-century urban sitcom. Eve is turned off, correctly recognizing that Roz is projecting her own (outdated) desires onto her.

There are also plenty of jokes about Frasier's enormous wealth, but the generational conflict underlying them is never addressed. As Grammer's colleagues have proven, this revival could have been more than a halfway satisfying exercise in '90s cosplay.