Whenever anyone asked Kelsey Grammer if Frasier was coming back in this age of revivals and reboots, he always said that the show wouldn’t come back until he found the right story to reflect Frasier Crane’s life in his 60s. Well, last year, he finally found the right story and ten episodes of a revival was shot right before the writers’ strike shut Hollywood down in May. Is the show, now streaming on Paramount+, truly worthy of being a sequel to the 1993-2004 classic or is it a cynical money grab?

Opening Shot: We see the classic Frasier intro, with the outline of Seattle, but that outline is blown off the screen by an airplane. Then we see Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) pushing a cart with his luggage in a Boston airport.

The Gist: Frasier is greeted by Alan Cornwall (Nicholas Lyndhurst), one of his best buddies from his Oxford days who is currently a psychology professor at Harvard. Even though Frasier has spent the last two decades in Chicago, most of which hosting a popular daytime talk show, he is actually flying in from Seattle, where he attended the funeral of his father Martin (the late John Mahoney, of course). With him is his nephew David (Anders Keith), a freshman psych major at Harvard who seems to be more like his father Niles (David Hyde Pierce, who won’t be in this revival) than his mother Daphne (Jane Leeves, who probably won’t be in this revival, either).

Frasier is in Boston to give a guest lecture in Alan’s class before he goes off to Paris to do research for his new book, but he also wants to see his son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott); Freddy didn’t come to Martin’s funeral and the two have been on the outs since Freddy decided to drop out of Harvard and become a firefighter.

He surprises Freddy at his apartment, and is highly disappointed that his son not only rushes him out the door, but never introduced him to Eve (Jess Salgueiro), whom he says is his girlfriend. Eve is also surprised about the girlfriend thing, but wants to know why Freddy hasn’t told his father about someone named John.

The next day, after his guest lecture in Alan’s class, Frasier meets Olivia Finch (Toks Olagundoye), the department head. She and Alan don’t particularly get along; he thinks she’s cold and ambitious and she thinks he’s drunk and lazy. But he’s got tenure, so his job is pretty safe. Olivia has an ulterior motive in visiting Frasier, though; she wants him to join the faculty in her department, not just because he’s famous but he wants to hold something over her sister, who’s a provost at Yale.

She does encourage Frasier to hash things out with Freddy as the three of them have a beer at a local pub named Mahoney’s (a lot of John Mahoney tributes on this show). Frasier brings some steaks and scotch over to Freddy’s place, but when he tries to be alone with his son, everyone seems to come over: David, Alan, Olivia, and Eve. Eve, by the way, actually lives with Freddy, and John is with her. Eve and Freddy take pains to hide John from Frasier, while all Frasier wants to do is talk to his son.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, this version of Frasier is a revival of the classic 1993-2004 original series, which was itself a spinoff from Cheers. Kelsey Grammer has been playing Frasier since 1984. Yes, that’s almost 40 years, folks! Except for James Burrows, who directed the first two episodes of this new run, the creative team from the original series is not involved; the showrunners for this version are Chris Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and Joe Cristalli (Life In Pieces).

Our Take: We’re not going to mince words here. The new version of Frasier gets off to a very rough start and only gets slightly better through the five episodes Paramount+ sent to critics for review. It’s not just because the show has an entirely new cast (aside from Grammer) that pales in comparison to the ensemble from the original series. The show has some glaring flaws, many of which are made worse by the fact that it takes too many pains to make parallels to the original.

Yes, there are references to the original series and to Cheers, most of which are fan service sledgehammers to fans of both shows, but are also at times the funniest moments of their respective episodes. The most fundamental problem, though, lies in the relationship between Frasier and Freddy.

Harris and Cristalli are positioning Freddy as a younger version of Martin, who has plebian tastes that drive the refined Frasier crazy. But as fans of the original series recall, Freddy was as big an egghead as his parents were (by the way, we’re likely to see Bebe Neuwirth, who plays Freddy’s mom Lilith, at some point during the series. And Peri Gilpin will reprise Roz Doyle at some point during the season, as well). But in the first few episodes, as Frasier and Freddy struggle to reconnect, it feels like he’s completely gone the other way, shunning his nerdy life to be just a regular Joe. It feels inauthentic and makes the first few episodes a rerun of how rough it was for Frasier and Martin to live together during the first half of the original’s first season.

We do see evidence of Freddy embracing the eggheaded side of his personality later in the five episodes, and we hope that’s fostered more as the season goes along. It’s one thing for Freddy to decide to be a firefighter instead of following in his parents’ footsteps, but the early episodes make him out to be a completely different person than the one we last saw as a teenager 20-plus years ago (by the way, the actor who played kid Freddy, Trevor Einhorn, is still a working actor — he had a recurring role in Mad Men — and could have easily played adult Freddy here).

One of the more underrated aspects of the original Frasier was that the workplace part of the show was as well developed as what was going on in Frasier’s personal life. We’ve loved Olangundoye and Lyndhurst over the years but the characters they play here, Olivia and Alan, are way too one-note to start. Again, as we see more episodes that revolve around Harvard, the more we see from both of them that gives us hope. But the Harvard piece of the puzzle still feels half-baked, especially in an episode where Frasier, Olivia and Alan scheme to get into a secret society, something that has been a plot on the original show more than once.

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We’re still not sure what purpose the character of David serves, except make us miss David Hyde Pierce all the more. Anders pushes hard to be an impression of what his father might have been like at 19 without giving us any notes of what he got from Daphne. In every episode, he seems to be no more than a character to make fun of rather than someone we end up rooting for.

Again, there are signs of hope: The more we get to know the people Freddy works with at his firehouse, the more we like them. And even Eve finds her footing a bit by the fifth episode, given how adrift she was in episodes 2, 3 and 4.

If Harris and Cristalli got a traditional broadcast network order of 22 episodes, we could tolerate this rough first five, with the thought that the show will find its footing by the end of the season. But the season is a streaming friendly ten episodes, which isn’t nearly enough time to refine the show to even get it to the point where it’s entertaining and occasionally amusing. While that’s still not the same as what we got from the raucous original, at least it would be watchable.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: In the credit tag, over a new version of “Tossed Salads And Scrambled Eggs,” Eve wrestles a scotch bottle from a sleeping Alan and puts a blanket over him.

Sleeper Star: We do hope the shows writers find a sweet spot for Jess Salgueiro, who plays Eve. She’s a smart, effervescent presence on the show who livens up the scenes she’s in. But, as we said, Eve’s role doesn’t even begin to be anchored down until maybe the fifth episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: In one of the many overt references to the original Frasier and to Cheers, Frasier sees a poster at the airport that says “Boston is calling… are you listening?”

Our Call: SKIP IT. It’s one thing to say that the new Frasier is missing the chemistry between the cast members that made the original series so special. But it also tries way too hard to parallel the original in the most crucial spots, making it painful to watch at times, and not nearly as funny as it could be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.