Kelsey Grammer to Star in New NBC EMT Drama ‘Pops’ — 20 Years After Frasier

Kelsey Grammer is heading back to NBC — and this time, he won’t be asking anyone if they’re listening.

The 71-year-old actor is set to star in and executive produce Pops, a new EMT drama in development at the network, according to Deadline. It’s a homecoming of sorts: NBC is where Grammer spent two decades building one of the most decorated sitcom characters in television history. But if you’re picturing another fussy psychiatrist with a fancy coffee order, think again. Pops trades the radio booth and the recliner for an ambulance bay.

The project is being written by Danny Weiss, a longtime writer and producer on Chicago Med, which means it comes with some built-in credibility when it comes to the world of first responders. And the premise is the kind of thing that sounds made up until you hear the real story behind it — because the real story is the whole point.

Here’s the setup. Grammer will play the title character, a man who has been aged out of a successful career and, desperate for a fresh start, throws himself into the chaotic world of emergency medicine. His colleagues? First responders half his age. His experience level? Zero. His nickname, eventually? You can guess.

It is, on paper, a fish-out-of-water story. But it’s also something rarer in network television: a drama about starting over when most people your age are supposed to be winding down.

A Very Different Kind of Role

Let’s be honest: when you hear “new Kelsey Grammer series on NBC,” your brain goes to one place. A multicam sitcom. A grumpy but lovable lead. A laugh track. Maybe a dog.

Pops isn’t that. It’s a drama, built around sirens and split-second decisions, and it asks Grammer to play a man who is, for once, the least experienced person in the room. That’s a genuine gear change for an actor who spent the better part of forty years playing the smartest guy in every scene.

Think about it. Frasier Crane was the guy with the answer. He had the degree, the vocabulary, the radio show, the opinions about wine. Even when he was wrong — and he was wrong constantly — he was wrong with total confidence. The man in Pops doesn’t get that luxury. He’s the rookie. He’s the one who has to be taught how to lift a stretcher, how to stay calm when everything goes sideways, how to earn the trust of people who have been doing this job since they were in their twenties.

That’s a fun reversal, and it’s the kind of role that can remind people why Grammer has lasted this long in the first place. He’s always been better than his reputation as a sitcom guy suggests. Anyone who watched him play the corrupt, Shakespeare-quoting mayor of Chicago in Starz’s Boss — a performance that won him a Golden Globe — knows there’s a whole other register there. Darker. Quieter. Meaner, when it needs to be.

An EMT drama gives him room to use all of it: the authority, the comic timing, the ability to make a monologue feel like it’s happening for the first time. And the age gap at the center of the show gives him something to push against. The younger medics will roll their eyes at him. He’ll earn them anyway. That’s the show.

The Real “Pops”

What makes Pops more than just a clever pitch is that it actually happened.

The series is based on the true story of Ed Levien, a Maryland resident who built a successful career in advertising and then, in his sixties, decided that wasn’t how his story was going to end. He became a volunteer EMT. His younger colleagues started calling him “Pops.” He stuck with it for twelve years, finally retiring last fall at the age of 76.

Read that again: twelve years. As a volunteer. Starting in his sixties.

Most of us, if we’re being honest, would have bought a nicer grill and called it a second act. Levien signed up to run toward the emergencies everyone else runs away from — and to do it for free, alongside people young enough to be his kids. That takes a particular kind of stubbornness, and it’s exactly the kind of stubbornness Grammer is good at playing.

It’s also worth saying: this is a story about a version of aging that television almost never shows. The standard-issue TV senior is either a wise grandparent dispensing one-liners or a tragic figure fading away in a hospital bed. Levien was neither. He was a guy who looked at a life that was already, by any normal measure, complete — career, success, the whole thing — and decided he wanted to be useful in a completely different way. Not as a mentor from the sidelines. As the new guy, carrying the bag.

There’s something genuinely moving about that, and if the show gets that part right, it could be special. The best medical dramas aren’t really about medicine. They’re about the people who choose to do the job, and why. Pops has a built-in answer to that question that most shows have to invent.

Frasier’s Long Shadow — and Why This Isn’t It

It is impossible to talk about Kelsey Grammer without talking about Frasier Crane. So let’s get it out of the way.

Grammer played Frasier for twenty straight seasons — nine on Cheers, from 1984 to 1993, and then eleven more on the spinoff Frasier, from 1993 to 2004. That is still a record for a live-action character played by the same actor in primetime. He won four Emmy Awards for the role. The show itself won 37 Emmys total. It was, by any sane metric, one of the great runs in television history.

And then, in 2023, he did it again. The Frasier revival on Paramount+ brought the character back to Boston, introduced a new generation of Crane family chaos, and ran for two seasons before the streamer pulled the plug. Grammer has been candid about wanting more — the revival ended with threads left dangling — but television, as ever, moves on.

That’s part of what makes Pops interesting. It isn’t an attempt to recreate Frasier, or to wink at it, or to trade on nostalgia for it. It’s a left turn. A drama, on broadcast, about a man starting over at an age when TV usually stops writing parts for people. If anything, it’s the anti-revival: instead of going back to the character that made him famous, Grammer is betting on a brand-new one, with a nickname earned the hard way.

It also reunites him with NBC in a meaningful way. Cheers and Frasier both aired on the network, and Grammer’s entire prime-time identity was basically built on Thursday nights in the ’90s. Coming back to the same network for a drama about an EMT in his seventies is a neat piece of symmetry — the same home, a completely different house.

And let’s not forget the rest of the résumé, either. Grammer has been voicing Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons for more than three decades, which remains one of the great stealth performances in animation. He played Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand and popped up again as the character in a post-credits scene in The Marvels. He played the villain in Transformers: Age of Extinction, starred in the action sequel The Expendables 3, and took on the role of pastor Chuck Smith in the surprise box-office hit Jesus Revolution in 2023. The man has range. He just doesn’t always get to show it.

What Comes Next

For now, Pops is in development, which in Hollywood means: promising, but not yet a sure thing. Development is the stage where scripts get written, notes get given, and a lot of really good ideas quietly die. So the sensible thing is to treat this as a strong maybe, not a premiere date.

Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. NBC knows Grammer. Grammer knows NBC. Weiss comes from the Chicago universe, which is basically NBC’s most reliable factory for this exact kind of show — blue-collar heroes, high stakes, ensemble chemistry. Chicago Fire has been running for over a decade on the same network. If anyone knows how to make a first-responder drama work on broadcast TV, it’s the people who built that franchise.

And the timing feels right. Television is full of shows about young people figuring out who they are. There are far fewer about older people doing the same thing — not because the audience isn’t there, but because the industry keeps assuming it isn’t. A show about a man who refuses to accept that his best years are behind him, who volunteers for the hardest job he can find at an age when most people are slowing down, is the kind of story that can sneak up on you. It has humor built into the premise, heart built into the true story, and a lead actor who knows exactly how to play a man who has something to prove.

Earlier this year, Grammer hinted that a major career shift might be on the horizon. At the time, nobody quite knew what he meant. Now we have a pretty good guess.

So: Frasier Crane, psychiatrist. Pops, EMT. Same actor, same network, completely different emergency. If the show makes it to air, it’ll be worth watching — if only to see a television legend start from scratch all over again, twenty years after he supposedly finished.

Source: Just Jared