Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer and EPs Explain His New Flirtation With Patricia Heaton’s Holly — Watch
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Frasier Season 2.
Frasier Crane has a new love interest in Season 2 — and it’s reminiscent of a classic TV romance from his old TV show. (No, the even older one.)
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Patricia Heaton joins the cast of Paramount+’s Frasier revival this season, making her debut in the second episode of Thursday’s two-part premiere, and her character Holly is a straight-shooting, blue-collar bartender. In other words, quite the opposite of the pretentious Harvard professor Frasier Crane. But they hit it off when Frasier visits her restaurant on Valentine’s Day, and their opposites-attract spark calls to mind Sam and Diane from Cheers, where Kelsey Grammer debuted as Frasier. So what attracts these two very different people to each other?
“They are kindred intellects,” Grammer tells TVLine in the video above. “They may like different things, but you can see a connection that’s mental,” which is “one that could become physical,” he teases. “The thing we fall in love with, it’s the eyes and the brain. That’s honestly what we really fall in love with.” (His co-star Peri Gilpin does take issue with that assertion, and Grammer concedes that “I guess there are some other parts.” But he insists that the mental connection is “what keeps people around.”)
In the past, “we’ve seen the character of Frasier go after the high socialite status woman, the erudite, the academic,” executive producer Joe Cristalli reminds us. But Heaton’s Holly is “blue-collar, salt of the earth, doesn’t take any nonsense,” he notes, “and there’s something sort of nice about seeing Frasier in that dynamic, of sort of being a fish out of water.”
Another possible obstacle for Frasier and Holly: She tells him she’s currently seeing someone else. That plot twist came about as a way to work around Heaton’s schedule, EP Chris Harris explains: “We knew we had her for one early episode, and then some later episodes, and so in a way, it was out of necessity. Let’s have them meet each other, let’s see some of those sparks and then let’s hold off. You kind of know that she’s gotta come back. Why would Patty Heaton be the bartender?”
Press PLAY above to see Grammer’s (dark!) hints at how Frasier deals with Holly’s boyfriend, and then tell us in the comments, Frasier fans: Are you rooting for these two already?
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