David Hyde Pierce Stands by Decision to Not Reprise Niles on Frasier Revival: ‘It’s Doing Great’

David Hyde Pierce does not regret his decision to sit out of Frasier’s recent Paramount+ revival series, but the call was more about wanting to pursue other projects than avoiding the reprisal of Frasier’s younger brother, Niles Crane.

“It’s not like I said, ‘Oh, I don’t ever want to do that again.’ I loved every moment,” the Frasier alum, who currently stars on Max’s Julia, tells the Los Angeles Times. “It was that I wanted to do other things. And when we got into real talks about the reboot, I had just started on the Julia TV show and was working on a musical and going to do another musical. And I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be committed to a show and not be able to do stuff like this.’ And I also thought, ‘They don’t actually need me.’ Frasier has moved on to a new world. They have new characters. And I think I’m right. It’s doing great. And the new people they have are great.”

The actor’s new quotes echo his sentiments from November of 2022, when he called the series “deeply important” to him.

“That whole time of my life [doing Frasier] is deeply important to me,” he said at the time. 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. But by the same token, because it’s so valuable to me, I also wouldn’t do it just to 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.”

The Frasier revival’s first season ran for 10 episodes and wrapped its run on Thursday, Dec. 7 with a Christmas-themed episode featuring the return of Peri Gilpin’s Roz Doyle. (Watch star Kelsey Grammer discuss Roz’s emotional finale return here.) While the new series follows its titular character after he moves back to Boston, the actor has ruled out a return to the famous bar that helped make the character one of TV’s best.

“We don’t want to desecrate a national monument,” Grammer said in reference to the fictional Cheers watering hole. “I’m not sure how we can have it live up to anything but a desecration… I think we honor it by excluding it.”

Do you agree with Pierce’s reasoning to not return? How do you feel the revival fared without him? Sound off in the comments.