Rumours of a Frasier reboot have been circling for several years, but if it is happening, it’s certainly taking a long time to get off the ground. In a recent interview with David Hyde Pierce, who plays MVP Niles Crane in one of the best 90s TV shows, he was inevitably asked about whether he’s considering a return to his most famous character.
Vulture asked Hyde Pierce if he’d ever been approached to do a spin-off; “No one has ever approached me about it so it’s not something I turned down. But it was also not something I was looking to do, so I wasn’t an engine behind it, either. In fact, by the time Frasier was ending, I knew I was going to be doing Spamalot, which was the first Broadway musical I’d ever done. So my focus was elsewhere.”
“And in the years since, whenever the show is talked about — I don’t have a strong feeling that there’s anything more that I can think of that I need to say about the character.”
Hyde Pierce continued; “But I’m not a writer. And I think if they came up with some way of telling the stories that intrigued me, then I might think, Oh, I could go back and do that. But in terms of my own drive and interest, no. I love those characters, but I don’t miss them.”
In terms of a potential sequel or reboot coming to Paramount Plus, Hyde Pierce says he’s open to the idea; “That whole time of my life, the writing on those shows, the actors I got to work with — all of that is deeply important to me. And I would never disrespect that in such a way as to say just offhandedly, “Oh, no, thanks. I’m not going to do that again.” It’s too valuable to me. But by the same token, because it’s so valuable to me, I also wouldn’t do it just do it.”
Hyde Pierce says that he might make a cameo as Niles, rather than be a series regular; “And I believe it can be done without me, too — finding new stories to tell, in the same way that Frasier did after Cheers. They didn’t bring along the Cheers gang to make a new show. They popped in from time to time and that was a blast, but there was something else that needed to be said, and it needed to be said in a different way. And maybe they will find that and I’ll be in it, or maybe they’ll find it and they won’t need me to be in it.”
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