This is wrong of me, I have not one single pixel of doubt over it. I am wrong. Whenever any show is cancelled, regardless of what you thought of it, that cancellation means people are out of work. It means that a startling amount of effort from so many people is over.

And yet when I heard that the reboot of Frasier has been cancelled, I actually said “good” aloud.

To be strictly accurate, the show is gone from whatever streamer it was on and is now being shopped around to others. Shows have been picked up this way, but it’s rare. “Hello, our show was a total failure on Network X, it will be a hit for you.” Okay.

Plus when a show moves networks there are rights issues. Maybe the new network can’t get rights to those episodes shown before, so its set is incomplete and it will struggle to sell the show on in physical media or other territories. And maybe the originating network figures that if it’s going to get egg on its face when the show is a hit somewhere else, it had better not be cut out of the profits.

That’s for any show, and Frasier isn’t any show. The rights on the title character go back four decades and now across three series. They must have been untangled for the reboot, but that doesn’t mean they’re sorted for further use.

So Frasier is being shopped, and I should wish it luck, but good. Because this reboot was an ordinary, quite old-fashioned sitcom. Setup, punch line, reaction shot of Frasier or another character. Jokes felt like they happened on the beat, that each page of the script had spots for five jokes equally spaced through it.

It doesn’t, I’ve read the script, but I re-read it earlier this week and I wasn’t exactly stone-faced throughout, yet even today I cannot tell you a joke from it that made me laugh. Whereas I also re-read the pilot script to the original Frasier and I can’t count how many times this very old and most of all very familiar script has made me happy.

And that’s despite this. The original Frasier opens with absolutely on-the-nose exposition. Frasier tells us, in so many words, exactly what the situation is with his character since he was on Cheers. He literally tells us. Then, too, we’ll get a line that sets up the fact he has a brother, and the screen actually shows a title card saying “The Brother”.

In comparison, the Frasier reboot has characters asking Frasier what’s happened, how he is, all of that.

By the textbook rules of writing, the Frasier reboot is better.

Except it doesn’t even come close.

Those characters in the reboot are asking Frasier things they should already know and have no earthly reason to hear again.”Weren’t you travelling with your nephew?” asks this character as he picks up Frasier at the airport. “Niles and Daphne’s son?”

In the original, Frasier’s speech about his life is dead on the nose, could not be plainer, and it works entirely. He’s now the host of a radio psychiatry show and a caller has said they are depressed. “Let me use myself as an example,” begins Frasier, and we get a tight potted history of him. Plus we get a line I have remembered from when this show first aired. “Six months ago I was living in Boston,” says Frasier. “My wife had left me, which was very painful. Then she came back, which was excruciating.”

I could wish to write as well as the writers behind the Frasier reboot. But for that original pilot script and countless more, I can only dream of writing as well as the 1990s show’s writers.