Let me give you a quick inside look at how things operate here in online entertainment journalism land: ABC sent us an invite to talk to Kelsey Grammer (and his co-star Melinda McGraw) during the same whirlwind "defending Hank" tour that Bob mentioned in his post yesterday. As much as I wanted to talk to Grammer, the conditions just didn't seem to be right.

For one, we would have had maybe ten minutes to talk to him. For another, he'd be defending a show that is a) terrible and b) on the verge of being cancelled. I want to talk to Grammer about comedy, Frasier, Cheers, his heart attack, and lots of other stuff. I wasn't particularly interested in him telling me how good he thinks Hank is for the whole interview.

But, when he told The TV Addict that last night's episode was going to be funny, it got me curious; maybe they had figured things out and made a leap in quality. So I tuned into last night's episode. I wish I hadn't.

Do you think there are times when Patricia Heaton wishes she was still working on Everybody Loves Raymond? What about Kelsey Grammer...don't you think there are days when he reflects on how lucky he was to have played Frasier Crane first on Cheers then on Frasier all those years, winning awards and having job security, critical acclaim, the knowledge that you were at the top of your game? That's not to say that either Patty or Kelsey are not on the top of their game now, but the failure of Fox's Back to You last season must have been a shock to the system.

Now they're both working on new sitcom projects and hoping for the best. Scrubs' Neil Flynn has joined Patricia Heaton in The Middles, an ABC sitcom pilot about a middle-class family living in middle America struggling in these tough economic times. They have three kids, too, just like the set up in Everybody Loves Raymond. Meanwhile, Kelsey Grammer's also doing comedy for ABC. The network has ordered a Grammer pilot about a corporate big shot who tries to reconnect with his estranged family.