By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Over the past few months of December, I found myself continuing my usual holiday tradition of watching Christmas episodes of my favorite sitcoms. Thanks to Hulu’s selection of holiday episodes (why are they the only major streamer to do this?), it was pretty easy to find the right episodes, and I ended up binge-watching every episode. SpawnChristmas episodes. In some ways, they were even better than I remembered, but like Lillith’s arrival at a Christmas party, one thing spoiled my enjoyment: remembering that the Spawn the reboot is relatively awful and may be the best example of a bad television revival.
The plot of the Frasier reboot
If you haven’t had the dubious pleasure of experiencing Spawn reboot for yourself, here’s the recap: We begin with our main character at a crossroads after her father dies, Charlotte leaves him, and her Dr. Phil-esque talk show ends. He decides to start fresh and returns to Boston to start a new teaching job at Harvard while rekindling his relationship with his son. However, the difficulties of adjusting to his new job and finding a common culture with his firefighter son are a constant reminder that although Frasier has gotten older, he has not necessarily become wiser.
Why is it bad
With this quicker-than-Eddie-running-a-bath summary, why do I think the Spawn is the reboot the ultimate example of a bad TV revival? The first and perhaps main reason is that the main cast of the revival is literally missing all of the ensemble characters that made the original series successful. The returning characters are mostly cast in tiny cameos, leaving the audience with a new cast of characters who just aren’t as entertaining or compelling as the previous ensemble.
It’s not the actors’ fault. The cast is generally talented, but equally original Spawn Writer Ken Levine explained on Hollywood & Levine that none of the characters in the reboot, except for his son, have any real connection to Frasier himself. This includes Alan Cornwall, a Harvard professor who is supposed to be his “best friend” but who “was never once mentioned” in Cheers Or Fraser. That’s a good point, and the longer he talked, the more I realized that the many problems with the show’s characters are what continue to unravel (in both narrative and comedy) what could be a reboot stellar.
Levine’s breakdown also includes Eve, a new mother who lives with Frasier’s son in the reboot after the death of her firefighter boyfriend. Levine points out that we need to ask ourselves an important question regarding his character’s history: “What does this have to do with Frasier?” He then asked if it was possible to “lose that character” before answering his own question with certainty: “of course it’s possible.”
The final character in the Frasier reboot that Levine focused on was Olivia Finch, Frasier’s dean at Harvard who is all too eager to hire a major celebrity to teach at the university. The author asked the big question: When it comes to a university as prestigious as Harvard, “what the hell do they give” to hire famous professors, something that would only matter to a ” very small college, a made-up Middlebury University.” .” His fascination with celebrity status also makes it more difficult to answer “what is his role?” » when it comes to directing Frasier.
In fact, it’s better
Reading his thoughts was like a revelation. Frankly, I felt a bit like Frasier himself as I internally talked about the new series, and Levine came in like Martin to speak frankly to me. An ensemble performance is, by definition, Nothing without its characters, and the Spawn the reboot was always going to succeed or fail based on the strength of its characters. But comparing the old Spawn In the new reboot, it’s easy to see that the characters in the new series have been a failure on all fronts.
However, everything Spawn‘s flaws didn’t stop the reboot from getting a second season, and this season (to be fair) managed to improve its existing characters while also bringing back fan-favorite original character Roz Doyle. While Season 1 was the ultimate example of a bad television revival, Season 2 finally seems like the series is heading (albeit very slowly, and still with rather awkward characters) in the right direction. And that leaves us with a moral worthy of a classic Spawn Christmas Episode: That it’s never too late, even for the worst among us, to work to become better.
