Laverne and Shirley ended that way too. People just don’t talk about it much. 

Ironic given that it’s called Variety.

So the going exchange rate is three AV Club articles for one Variety article?

I don’t want to disrespect Angell, but I think it had also more or less run its course by that time. I just rewatched it for the who knows what time, and I think it fell in the trap that many great shows do and didn’t know when to quit. I agree with you, it’s not like it was bad, but it had certainly run out of steam.…

“Has a single person ever actually seriously considered this as a possibility?”

I think “Vince Gilligan attempts to find diplomatic ways of putting down stupid as fuck story pitches until eventually his sanity cracks” should be an ongoing series.

Friendly reminder that James Burrows is now 82, so a certain amount of “old man huffing and puffing at cloud” energy shouldn’t be too unexpected.

Angell not dying tragically certainly couldn’t have hurt, but by then season 8 (the first one after Daphne and Niles became a thing) was in the bag, and it seems to be regarded as one of the show’s worst (which means the quality of the writing was only a lot higher than other sitcoms, not astronomically higher).

I wish they had just called this show something else. Frasier without Niles, Daphne, Roz, Martin, Eddie, or, heck, 1901 Elliot Bay Towers or Cafe Nervosa just doesn’t feel like Frasier. In fact, it feels like Kelsey Grammer doing a guest spot as Frasier on an episode of How I Met Your Mother. I’d more readily accept…

“Frasier” without Niles is...definitely not the same. I assume they moved this to Boston to 1. Explain away the absence of Niles and Daphne and 2. Leave the door open for any Cheers cast members to make guest appearances. But I don’t know if that was a good idea. Better to put the character in a completely different…

The teasers look awful—-hopefully that isn’t the “best scenes” of the reboot.

Burrows, at least, is doing his part by directing the first two episodes of the upcoming Frasier reboot, even though he “had nothing to do with the writing of the pilot” and “was just handed a script.”

He was sentenced to hang in Australia. So he survived, as it’s upside-down there.

If I remember, the book implies he’s sent to Australia when he finally gets caught and sentenced for theft. So that, at least, is canonical. And Magwitch from Great Expectations made a fortune honestly when was sent to Australia, so hey, anything is possible.

We also have doctors here, so it all makes sense.

The twist is that the main villain is really Oliver Twist.

Dodger? I just met ‘er!

I thought I’d be sad when I got to the age of not knowing about current pop culture trends, but now that it’s happened I’m pretty cool with it.

I get why he’s in Australia, cause that’s where they sent criminals.

I was about to say, I get why they wanted to use authentic accents but that exec had a point.  Real Jamaican accents can be impossible to understand if you’re not used to them.  They would have had to use subtitles.