Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane, a character whose televised exploits now span nearly four decades, was even at his inception not just a misfit but an anachronism.

An unrepentant stuffed-shirt elitist amid the working-class milieu of the beloved 1980s sitcom Cheers, he was also a Russell Kirk type in the Reagan era; the kind of person who still considered Gilbert and Sullivan “pop” in the age of MTV, a duck a l’orange traditionalist surrounded by Wolfgang Pucks. The joke, at which the viewers of Cheers and its subsequent spinoff Frasier were invited to indulgently chuckle, was that the USS Abraham Lincoln of high culture had already left our shores with Frasier a delusional Cio-Cio-San assured of its return.

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So what to make of him now, as Frasier returns for its seemingly inevitable streaming service reboot? Time has proved those chuckling viewers correct in their estimation of where culture was heading — as one only has to briefly survey the years between now and the original series’s end in 2004 to determine. It’s easy to imagine a septuagenarian Frasier in the real world of 2023, embittered, pickled in Chateau Petrus, utterly alone and raging in some godforsaken comments section against minor changes to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programming schedule.

Thankfully, this is not the case. The new series, helmed by TV veteran Chris Harris and relative upstart Joe Cristalli — who connected with Grammer’s production outfit after running a modestly popular fake Frasier Twitter feed, as he told the Hollywood Reporter — takes a different tack. Like its titular character, the 2023 iteration of Frasier chooses for the most part to forge ahead as if nothing has changed, hugging sitcom cliche and the original series’s wry-yet-accessible charm close, like a 1985 Montrachet Laguiche. While not always comedically successful, the series’s first five episodes manage to, at the very least, stave off the despair induced by an honest assessment of the passage of time, arguably the No. 1 job of any decent sitcom.

The premise is almost insultingly obvious: Frasier Crane, fresh from yet another heartbreak in the city of Chicago to which he absconded in the Frasier series finale, has returned to Boston to reconnect with his son. Like Frederick William II of Prussia, Frasier’s son Freddy has turned away from his predecessor’s enlightened Epicureanism toward the masculine stoicism of the previous generation, neatly reversing the original series’s dynamic. Where once Frasier had to indulge and tolerate the working-class peccadilloes of his own father, played in the original Frasier by the great character actor John Mahoney, he’s now the unwanted, alien old man, embarrassing and aggrieving his son, a rock-jawed Boston firefighter who drinks his scotch from a jug, not a decanter.

While that role reversal provides the “situation,” the “comedy” mostly comes from elsewhere. Absent any of the original series’s stellar supporting cast — series stalwarts Bebe Neuwirth and Peri Gilpin have been announced, but haven’t appeared yet — a new group steps in, led by Jack Cutmore-Scott as Freddy and a predictably game turn from the English sitcom veteran Nicholas Lyndhurst as a former Oxford chum of Frasier’s. The less said about the rest of the new cast, the better. But Frasier Crane remains the role that Kelsey Grammer, the two of whom often seem indistinguishable, was born to play. Watching him inhabit it and execute the precise comedic timing required to make an old-fashioned sitcom function properly is one of the finer privileges afforded by what he would surely characterize as “low” culture.

Speaking of which, it must be said: The humor in the new series’s pilot, and occasionally through the rest of the new episodes, is excruciating. The debt Frasier pays to the state of pop culture circa 2023 is a voluminous injection of overly ingratiating, “well-that-just-happened”-style meta-humor, which permeates the first episode to the extent that it risks entirely alienating a viewer who remembers the original series’s middlebrow charm. The young actor Anders Keith is particularly unlucky, burdened with portraying the progeny of Frasier’s brother Niles (played in the original series by David Hyde Pierce, in an exquisite, medium-perfecting, Noel-Coward-by-way-of-Bugs-Bunny performance). The character is written as a glitchy photocopy of Pierce as filtered through Jim Parsons’s Sheldon, the satanic Big Bang Theory mascot, and just as entertaining as that might imply.

It's difficult not to think about The Big Bang Theory, the centerpiece of sitcom auteur Chuck Lorre’s media empire, while watching the new Frasier. The latter series was the apotheosis of the golden age of the TV sitcom, winning an eye-popping 37 Emmy awards from 1993 to 2004 and somehow making ratings gold out of references to Francois de La Rochefoucauld and Jacob’s Pillow. The former dominated its own era of television, but with much less competition, bearing the lonely standard of network television as it reified the “geek culture” that has gradually dethroned Agamemnon for Aquaman.

Stylistic trappings aside, the new Frasier for the most part rejects the defining edges of our modern culture and embraces the elitist trappings of the original, albeit without the sting the dialogue of the original series occasionally carried. The landscape it presents is touchingly simple in our time of endless, refractory culture wars and arguments about who the university, or YouTube, or parenthood, belongs to: there are salt of the earth working-class people, and blinkered yet lovable snobs such as Frasier. Maybe — just maybe, with a little bit of patience, a lot of love, and plenty of laughs — they can reconcile with each other and teach us all a thing or two about getting along.

The new series’s unavoidable nostalgia is in its spirit and (mostly) not its text, befitting its creators’ characterization of the show as a “spinoff” and not a “reboot.” “Reboots” are for comic book heroes. Frasier Crane, for all his silly broadness, is very human.

That’s why you feel catharsis when he heroically catches a vintage bottle of Ernest Shackleton’s Mackinlay malt whiskey, knocked off the shelf by a blithe conspirator, or laugh when he accepts the humiliation of acting out a Dr. Phil-style daytime TV seminar in front of his Harvard psychology class, or unwittingly mispronounces the name of the Boston Celtics. Like the writing of fellow sitcom greats James L. Brooks or Glen and Les Charles of Cheers, Frasier’s antics have always been powered by deeply basic, human emotions dressed up with cultural effluvia, not the other way around. The original Frasier was far superior beyond comparison to this revival, but they share that trait.

For that reason, even if it’s unlikely to become appointment television — indeed, even if it’s unclear who the series is even for beyond television critics and 1990s nostalgists — it’s a welcome dose of non-toxic nostalgia, as rare in this era as an unreconstructed snob like Frasier was when he first appeared in 1984.

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Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.