‘Frasier’ EPs on Possible Freddy & Eve Romance in a Season 2
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If there is another season of the Frasier revival on Paramount+ — the first ended on December 7 — it may continue to just offer small teases of a possible romantic relationship between Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Eve (Jess Salgueiro).
Executive producers Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli both acknowledge we could see that, but it would take some time if so. “It’s definitely always been a thought of ours, but we want to make sure that we do what feels right for the characters,” Harris told TV Insider.
Furthermore, after fans watched Niles (David Hyde Pierce) and Daphne’s (Jane Leeves) relationship play out in the original run (11 seasons, from 1993 to 2004), “we decided there was no way we were going to match that idea of this one person chasing this other person,” he continued. “So let’s slow play it. Let’s not put it front and center. Let’s sort of mimic life in a way and see what feels natural as we slowly unpack it. But it’s definitely something that we’re thinking about.”
Also, noted Cristalli, “In just the realm of common decency, his best friend [with whom Eve had a baby] died pretty recently, so it feels like you can’t really do anything for a couple seasons. You can maybe give some hints, and maybe if it’s there, it’ll blossom. But yeah, I don’t think there’s anything imminent that could possibly happen for them.”
Chris Haston/Paramount+
The revival has dealt with how both Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and Eve are handling their losses — his father and her boyfriend, respectively — but Freddy is grieving those people as well. In the finale, Eve, in thanking Freddy for helping her, brought up just that. He said he was okay, but she suggested he was running around trying to make everyone else happy so he wouldn’t have to think about how he felt.
The season itself didn’t touch much on Freddy’s grief, and Harris pointed to the premiere in which he addresses it. “I don’t know if we felt like we could match that,” he explained. “I think there’s a lot to talk about and explore going forward because obviously it is a big deal and he wasn’t magically healed at the end of the pilot, and that’s what Eve is getting at in that final episode when she talks with him in the kitchen.”
Added Cristalli, “Especially from just the character standpoint, it feels like that scene in the pilot takes so much for Freddy to get to. It’s almost impossible for him to even say it, that it’s his dad literally demanding to know what’s going on. So to kind of unpack it again and again feels like it would do disservice to how important that first one was with the dad.”
That being said, they do plan to address the fact that he lost his grandfather and best friend going forward. “That’s going to be kind of the underpinning for him going forward,” according to Cristalli. “There’s so much. He’s living with his dad next door to the partner of his deceased best friend. There’s a reason he’s not jumping to get out of this apartment building. There’s a lot happening right there for him. … You want to just give a few breadcrumbs and really earn those big meals at the end.”
Hopefully there’s a second season so they can do just that.
Frasier, Streaming Now, Paramount+
