Kelsey Grammer Wants Shelley Long’s Diane From ‘Cheers’ To Return In ‘Frasier’ Reboot

Armando Tinoco
·3 min read

Kelsey Grammer doesn’t have any plans for any of the Cheers characters to pop up in the new Frasier sitcom. However, the actor who plays Dr. Frasier Crane does think that Diane Chambers, played by Shelley Long, deserves some closure.

“I would like to see Diane come back,” Grammer said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “For one of those reasons of Frasier to be able to put something to bed. To end up with a nice thing between them.”

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He continued, “When I first got the role, the key to Frasier for me was that he loved her with his whole heart, that he loved with all of his being. And that actually defined who he is and he’s been that way ever since. He just goes in wholeheartedly with everything — and that’s what makes him funny.”

Grammer’s Frasier character was introduced in Season 3 of Cheers as a love interest to Long’s Diane, who had been linked with Ted Danson’s Sam Malone. Long reprised her role on the original Frasier making several appearances as part of dream sequences. In Season 3 of the spinoff, Long appeared in the episode titled “The Show Where Diane Comes Back.”

The new Frasier series takes Dr. Crane back to Boston, but the Cheers bar is closed and explains the reason behind the relocation.

“I wanted to bring the whole legacy cast back but in a different world where we’ve all moved on to something else but we would still be connected — that didn’t happen,” he explained.

Grammer said that after the idea was shot down, in a dream, he thought about taking the character back to his roots as “he didn’t leave Boston the right way.”

“The original concept was that [Frasier] had to get all the way across the country because we just wanted to get away from Boston to start the new show,” he continued. “But that was just a geographical happenstance. I thought in this one — the thing with Diane didn’t work out, he got divorced, his son has been in Boston ever since — I thought he has stuff he’s gotta do in Boston still. When he went there as a young man to first go to Harvard, it didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, so he has some stuff to deal with.”

Grammer also teased that the show will pay tribute to John Mahoney, who played Dr. Crane’s father in the sitcom and got emotional talking about the late actor.

“John died a few years back and I just thought, ‘We can’t do the show again without honoring John,'” Grammer said as his voice broke thinking about Mahoney. “And it has to begin with the fact that John is gone and dad is gone and so then, I become dad.”

Watch Grammer’s full interview in the video posted below.

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