There’s so much that’s right about “Back to You” that it’s almost a little too easy to suggest that it could singlehandedly revive the traditional multi-camera before-a-live-studio-audience sitcom. And, yet, how can you not feel like that may well prove to be the case when its stars include a comedy trifecta in Kelsey Grammer (“Cheers,” “Frasier”), Patricia Heaton (“Everybody Loves Raymond”), and Fred Willard (just about every comedy ever) and its executive producers are Steven Levitan (“Greg the Bunny,” “The Larry Sanders Show”), Christopher Lloyd (“Frasier,” “The Golden Girls”), and James Burrows (just about every comedy ever)?
You see my point, I think.
Heaton said that it was her manager who originally pitched the idea that she and Grammer would make a good onscreen duo, but the idea appealed to her immediately. “It just seemed right,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, me and Kelsey together would be a lot of fun.’ And what can we do? We’re thinking maybe college professors, maybe that should be it. He’ll be the old, dead, white male writers professor, and I’ll be the women’s lib professor, and we’ll do something like that. And it just kind of didn’t hear anything about it. And then I was doing this play in New York for 600 bucks a week, and they said there’s this sitcom, and I said, ‘Yes, whatever it is.'”
“That’s very flattering, Patty,” said Levitan.
“That college professors pilot sounds interesting, too,” nudged Willard. “Don’t forget that.”
Despite having played the character of Frasier Crane for decades, Grammer stands ready to dive headlong into another role. “I’m an actor. That’s what we do. I played (Frasier) as long as I did only because he remained interesting to play. This guy has a whole new set of difficulties that are equally interesting.”
Grammer also mused, “I like to think that based upon my knowledge of most television newscasting now, it has nothing do with the news, anyway. So I’m very happy to just be another performer pretending to be a performer.”
As far as the difficulties for Lloyd in seeing Grammer in a different light than the one he viewed him in as a producer of “Frasier” for so many years, Lloyd says there was a certain amount struggle in finding a new character for him. “We wanted someone that was obviously not Frasier again,” he explained, “but not so far away from Frasier that people would say, ‘Well, what, he’s a sheriff in Alaska?’ It had to be close enough to him that people could accept him, but also to utilize some of his great strengths. He plays big attitudes well, and pomposity. We wanted sort of a public forum for him, which is how we wound up on the news and using Steve’s background there.”
I’ll close with a great anecdote from Levitan, one which, by itself, is pretty much what has kept him considering a TV-news-based sitcom for all these years:
“There was an anchorman in Madison, Wisconsin, (and) when we were trying to come up with, ‘Well, what’s a good idea for Kelsey?,’ this guy sort of popped into my head. It was the night that John Lennon was shot, and it was very sad. They went to the footage around The Dakota and people crying. It was very sad. You know it was a very big moment for him. They came back to him, and he went, very dramatically, ‘Lennon is survived by his wife, Topo Gigio.’ That has always stayed with me. What’s so funny to me about local news is there’s this great narcissism pretending to be altruism. It’s just a wonderful place for a larger-than-life character to be a big fish in a small pond.”
Sold!
