Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane, a character whose televised exploits now span nearly four decades, was even at his inception not just a misfit but an anachronism.

An unrepentant stuffed-shirt elitist amid the working-class milieu of the beloved 1980s sitcom Cheers, he was also a Russell Kirk type in the Reagan era; the kind of person who still considered Gilbert and Sullivan “pop” in the age of MTV, a duck a l’orange traditionalist surrounded by Wolfgang Pucks. The joke, at which the viewers of Cheers and its subsequent spinoff Frasier were invited to indulgently chuckle, was that the USS Abraham Lincoln of high culture had already left our shores with Frasier a delusional Cio-Cio-San assured of its return.