David Hyde Pierce won’t reprise Niles in Frasier reboot

David Hyde Pierce will not be joining Kelsey Grammer in the Frasier reboot, but Grammer says our beloved psychiatrist will have a good time even without his little brother.

“David basically decided he wasn’t really interested in repeating the performance of Niles,” Grammer told People. Fortunately, however, the setback forced the Frasier writers to think up a more interesting plot for its main character than a stale cast reunion. “In a very funny way, it just took us to a new place, which was what we originally wanted to do anyway, which was a Frasier third act,” Grammer said. “It’s an entirely new life for him.”

Frasier ran for 11 seasons from 1993 to 2004. Once the sitcom ended, Hyde Pierce went on to work in theater, and most recently appeared in the HBO Max series Julia. In a June interview with Vulture, the actor looked back on Frasier fondly, offering a surprisingly level-headed perspective on whether or not reboots work.

“That whole time of my life, the writing on those shows, the actors I got to work with — all of that is deeply important to me. And I would never disrespect that in such a way as to say just offhandedly, ‘Oh, no, thanks. I’m not going to do that again.’ It’s too valuable to me,” Hyde Pierce said. “But by the same token, because it’s so valuable to me, I also wouldn’t do it just do it. And I believe it can be done without me, too — finding new stories to tell, in the same way that Frasier did after Cheers. They didn’t bring along the Cheers gang to make a new show. They popped in from time to time and that was a blast, but there was something else that needed to be said, and it needed to be said in a different way. And maybe they will find that and I’ll be in it, or maybe they’ll find it and they won’t need me to be in it.”

Rehearsals for the Frasier reboot, which will air on Paramount+, begin in February. The new episodes come from writers Chris Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and Joe Cristalli (Life in Pieces), and will depict the main character in a new city. “He’s our brave little soldier that continues on in life, finding new challenges and a new love and new people and a new city and stuff like that,” Grammer said. “I’m really very excited about it, and we’ll certainly always honor the past. We have to honor the fact that John Mahoney died and that Martin is no longer with us. We’ll be dealing with that for sure.”

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