‘Frasier’ Bosses Talk Reunion With Lilith, What Changed With Her & Alan
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Frasier Episode 7, “Freddy’s Birthday.”]
All Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) wants to do is enjoy his birthday, which of course means not having his parents in the same room. Unfortunately, what happens is both Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth) attend his party. Chaos, of course, ensues.
“What an honor” to bring that relationship back onscreen, Frasier executive producer Chris Harris tells TV Insider. “I was a teenager watching these two on TV, and so most of the time, we were just pinching ourselves and amazed we get to continue their story.”
It all begins when Frasier sees Freddy at the bar and incorrectly thinks he’s on a date, until he sees Lilith at the table. They worked backwards from that moment, executive producer Joe Cristalli shares. Frasier “just falling backwards gasping was such a funny moment that we broke that we kind of worked from there, but it also made sense that they wouldn’t really be seeking each other out for a couple weeks,” he explains.
“In Freddy’s mind, speaking from the character’s point of view, he knows what his parents are like together. So the longer he can keep them apart, the better. And I don’t know that Frasier was seeking out Lilith because even though they are a little bit later in their life, and even though they may have a better relationship, it’s still pretty fiery,” he points out. “I don’t know that Frasier’s going out and searching to go to dinner with Lilith. So I think it was by design that, ‘Well, I don’t need to see my ex-wife. It’s not that important to me.’ And I think Freddy kind of felt the same way.“
While they did “dance around a couple other” possibilities to bring the exes back together, “birthday was the most organic way because in our version, Frasier’s been in town for ostensibly at least a month and a half, if not more,” says Cristalli. “So the idea that they haven’t seen each other but were being forced together for an event seemed to make the most sense to us.“
Harris agrees. “It’s inevitable that Lilith is going to show up in Frasier’s life again because now they’re all in the same town,” he adds. “And so what better event than something that’s about Freddy, who’s caught in between the two of them?”
At the party, Frasier and Lilith compete over who knows Freddy best, which eventually ends in a quiz about him (and that’s how she finds out the father and son live together). Their presents, of course, play into that. Frasier gets him a pen once owned by J.D. Salinger (with his favorite book The Catcher in the Rye), while Lilith gets Freddy a football — and has Vince Wilfork there to sign it (trying to use the aforementioned pen).
“The only thing that really fell in place at the end was we had trouble securing a guest star,” Cristalli shares. “So we were lucky to get Vince Wilfork by the end. We talked to a bunch of different people, and we wanted to make sure we had a recognizable name. I feel like he was maybe cast a couple days beforehand.“
The plan was always to have it be an athlete. “There was something nice about sort of that super old school throwback of the celebrity guest star,” he says. “I think we had started with a baseball player, but then honestly any Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, Bruins player would’ve been amazing. So we just went with the best person.”
Frasier and Lilith spend the episode sniping at each other, then, as he shows her the apartment and Freddy’s room, they note how “combustible” they were — if they weren’t tearing each other’s heads off, they were tearing each other’s clothes off — before briefly giving into passion on their son’s bed … until Freddy walks in.
“When we talked with both of them — and obviously both Kelsey and Bebe had some really clear thoughts about it — both of them talked about how Frasier and Lilith are each people in each other’s lives where they’re just always going to be connected. They’re always going to be riling each other up and getting each other passionate, whether in anger or in passion,” Harris notes. “And Bebe especially wanted us to make sure that we have a moment where we reflect on that, where in a way they’re past the most difficult parts of their relationship, but they can’t help but fall into those patterns. That’s what we decided to mine in that bedroom scene towards the end.”
Chris Haston/Paramount+
But what’s comedy gold is Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst) trying so hard to remind Lilith of who he was to the point that he puts on the suit he wore to her and Frasier’s wedding. “Originally I had some idea that we wanted Alan to just have a crush on Lilith. Lilith comes in and Alan just wants to date her,” Cristalli reveals. “And Chris, rightfully so, said he didn’t think that was going to work. And then we found this idea of him wanting to just be remembered — ‘I was at your wedding, remember me’ — and then putting him in a white linen suit. You already have the joke engine of Lilith and Frasier just throwing grenades at each other, but then you added Nick just sort of prancing through scenes, just, oh my God. It was just a gift that kept on giving.”
The tag saw Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) find him in his office. “For a while, [it] was just him sitting there, petting [the cat], and then I think on set or maybe in the script, we ended up putting, ‘Hey, just start choking. You laugh so hard that you can’t even breathe anymore,'” the EP continues. “And it’s just him coughing and Olivia rolling her eyes and exiting. Oh, it’s so delightful.”
Frasier, Thursdays, Paramount+
