Frasier Season 2’s Premiere Featured A Kooky And ‘Very Slimy’ Ham Gag, And Anders Keith And Jess Salgueiro Told Us What It Was Like Shooting That Sequence
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Warning: SPOILERS for the Frasier Season 2 premiere, titled “Ham,” are ahead!
The Frasier revival is back and airing on the 2024 TV schedule, with the first two episodes of Season 2 being released to Paramount+ subscription holders today. The Season 2 premiere, titled “Ham,” included Anders Keith’s David Crane and Jess Salgueiro’s Eve getting into shenanigans with an expensive ham that Kelsey Grammer’s title character and Nicholas Lyndhurst’s Alan Cornwall purchased to celebrate their 40-year-old friendship. In typical Frasier fashion, this cut of meat went through hell over the course of just minutes, and Keith and Salgueiro spoke to me about what it was like for them shooting that kooky and “very slimy” sequence.
It was already bad enough with Frasier Crane getting angry at Alan over the role he played in convincing his son Freddy to drop out of Harvard and become a firefighter without informing him, which subsequently threatened to ruin Ham Day. On top of that though, the mere task of David needing to keep the ham pristine while his uncle was out was complicated when he and Eve decided to sample some of this delectable foodstuff from Spain. While covering the Frasier Season 2 junket on behalf of CinemaBlend, I asked Anders Keith what it was like for him shooting this portion of the episode that saw the ham being abused in many ways, and he answered:
It was a lot of fun, I had to come in early some mornings and work on that ham. I lost a pair of pants because they were just so infused with grease. ‘Cause we used a real ham is the thing! So it was a real Iberico ham, and the fat cap on it is huge. So I was wrestling it. There were many different versions… I’m pushing it on the ground, slipping and sliding around. Only towards the end was the cake added. That’s a whole science of, ‘Anders, you gotta make it landed perfectly in the middle of the cake.’ It takes real effort to do physical stuff like that, and well worth it I say. It was a lot of fun, some of the most fun I had in the season.
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From landing in the aforementioned cake to getting stuck in the garbage disposal to being embedded with shards of glass, that ham never stood a chance. Frankly, I’m surprised the real deal was used rather than a convincing prop. But all that made for great comedic material, and was another example of how well Anders Keith does emulating the kind of physical comedy David Hyde Pierce did as Niles in the original Frasier (who we won’t be seeing in the revival).
However, all was not lost, as during the credits sequence, Frasier’s main characters got to enjoy samplings of the ham… once the glass was removed, of course. While Jess Salgueiro was recalling the ham sequence, she noted how the show’s props master kindly took her vegetarianism into account, saying:
Very slimy, and I am a vegetarian, so they actually cut a little pocket in the ham and stuffed vegan cold cuts into it for me, which was very sweet of our props master Jim. It was insane and so much fun. Working with Anders is always blast. But yeah, it’s really slimy. He’s acting, but it really is that slippery. I didn’t expect that.
If you’ve read this far and haven’t watched “Ham” for yourself, head over to Paramount+ to rectify that now, as well as watch the second episode of Frasier Season 2, titled "Cyrano, Cyrano.” As indicated by the title, this episode sees Frasier trying to help repair the romantic relationship between Toks Olagundoye’s Olivia and Jimmy Dunn’s Moose by channeling the protagonist from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play. In the process, he meets a bartender named Holly, played by Kelsey Grammer’s Back to You costar Patricia Heaton.