FRASIER IS IN THE BUILDING!

Kelsey Grammer's famous psychiatrist moves back to Boston to hang out with a whole new TV family. (But there's still a bar!) 

- JIM HALTERMAN

ON AN APRIL evening on Paramount’s Stage 31 in Hollywood, Kelsey Grammer beams as he stands in front of a starstruck studio audience. Moments before taping an episode of the Frasier revival, he kisses his wife, Kayte Walsh, who sits in the front row, and mic in hand, his voice cracks as he thanks the audience for coming. He adds that, besides it being a special episode with Bebe Neuwirth appearing as Frasier’s frosty ex, Dr. Lilith Sternin, today is also 19 years to the day that the original Frasier series finale was taped.

“It’s a rarefied thing to have a chance to do a show like Frasier and to play a character like that,” a grateful Grammer tells TV GUIDE MAGAZINE a few months later (pre–actors’ strike) about returning to the Cheers spinoff that ran from 1993 to 2004 on NBC. “When you’re there on those tape nights, the audience, the outpouring of love is so dynamic and so lovely.”

That love began way back in 1984 when stuffy psychiatrist Frasier Crane first appeared on Cheers and kept his Boston barstool warm until that series wrapped in 1993. Then, four months later,