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The second season of the resurrected Frasier is upon us. Like most resurrected shows it exists for no purpose other than to attract subscribers to one of half a dozen streaming services.

But what is more interesting than the sitcoms that have come back is the ones that haven’t.

Frasier was originally a spinoff of Cheers. After struggling to keep the much more popular series alive, the producers abandoned any hope of keeping Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson on the NBC reservation and decided to follow the same path as the endless spinoffs of Happy Days masterminded by Gary Marshall in the 70s and early 80s, and built a show around Kesley Grammer. The rest, like Cheers, is history. And history isn’t meant to be dug up.

Paramount came calling to Kelsey to unnecessarily revive the character yet again (accompanied by a more appropriately diverse cast for modern audiences), but the only extant Cheers project around is the ‘Where Everybody Knows Your Name’ podcast with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson. Even though the current Frasier revival is set in Boston, the Cheers bar won’t show up. Grammer has argued that not showing the bar is how “we honor it by excluding it.”

Why not revive or reboot with a new cast what was once such a popular series that ending it made NBC executives fearful for survival of the network? Because it’s a working class sitcom.

The working class sitcom, like the rural TV series, once a staple of television is dead. The current media landscape would be as likely to make a celebratory miniseries about Rush Limbaugh as it would to put on a show about a bunch of white people in a Boston bar.

It’s not that the audience for such a show would not exist. Cheers has been kept alive on multiple streaming services and in an age where people feel increasingly lonely, the idea of random people finding camaraderie around a drink would touch more than a few chords.

But the issue is that those are not the kinds of people we tend to see on TV anymore.

The new diversity mandates offer every possible variety of culture, gender and racial combos, but all that fake diversity belies the lack of any real class diversity. Let alone political diversity. The revival of Roseanne, one of the most successful working class sitcoms, ended with the elimination of its titular figure because she had the temerity to criticize an Obama adviser.

Working class sitcoms didn’t just feature people who were poorer, but who thought differently. And people who think differently might also feel differently and vote differently. Actual diversity is explosive which is why All in the Family made Archie Bunker into a cultural touchstone and Michael J. Fox emerged from Family Ties as a star. And these days it can hardly be found.

Modern sitcoms tend to star hipsters, woke bourgeoisie of various varieties, who have the same basic worldviews and politics, which makes it easy to shill for subscriptions to streaming services and upsell products aimed at that same category of upscale consumers.

Advertisers shunned any programs aimed at rural Americans or older adults. First the countryside vanished from network television and then the elderly. Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher was offed despite high ratings. The working class sitcom lingered longer but advertisers had as little use for it as they did for any shows that were not of their class. And that is why Frasier has made a comeback and why Cheers won’t.

A variation on the working class sitcom occasionally resurrects, sometimes in unexpected ways, and can become popular, as when Big Bang Theory, a classic hipster show, birthed Young Sheldon, but it never stays long because it has become a foreign thing in Hollywood. Working class families are now more likely to exist in cartoon form, like King of the Hill, than live action.

The old sitcom makers had either been born to working class families or had grown up around them so that they had some reference points beyond the tropes of their own industry, but any of those writers still alive are usually into their eighties and the new writers are their grandkids. Growing up in a bubble, the only thing they know how to write about is the bubble. And while the bubble may be outwardly diverse, the only permitted diversity is in one direction.

Sitcoms may occasionally touch on or collide with the working class, but they no longer understand them. And more poignantly, they harbor a political dislike for them.

Especially if they’re white.

The old working class sitcoms were made by old lefties who believed that ordinary people were the real America. That hoary old class warfare cliche was replaced with racial warfare and its accompanying conviction that the Reagan Republicans, the perpetrators of the ‘Hardhat Riots’, are despicable people who are holding America back. As Oprah observed, they “have to die”.

The white working class is far from dead, but in a marketplace built around streaming service subscriptions and diversity quotas, they might as well be, and that’s why Cheers won’t be coming back. Frasier can be surrounded by some token diversity, and somebody’s idea of a more ‘ordinary’ and ‘down to earth’ son, but Cheers is just irredeemable.

Ignoring half the country hasn’t been great for the business model of Peak TV. A streaming service could distinguish itself from the endless Netflix wannabes frantically throwing money at whatever intellectual property they own by actually making shows for conservatives.

Or not conservatives, but the normal middle half of the country. That same sane part of the country is pathetically grateful for whatever crumbs like Yellowstone, Reacher or Young Sheldon thrown its way and quickly turns them into hits despite the contempt for them that the actors, producers and writers make no secret of both in interviews and in the shows themselves.

But politics has long since come ahead of entertainment, ratings be damned.

Hollywood and dot com execs would rather throw endless billions chasing the same 19% of the audience than look beyond that because entertainment is an expression of their values.

And there’s no room for Norm in the brave new world that they have made.

When Frasier first wandered into Cheers, the joke was that he was out of place, but in today’s wasteland of the elites, the joke is that Frasier belongs, and Cheers is the one out of place.