The Grinder is a wildly familiar sitcom premise: white guy who has coasted through life on charisma finds himself humbled, rebuilding his life around his white family and all the pretty white people in his hometown. In fact, it’s so similar, FOX is essentially airing it twice between The Grinder and Grandfathered, which both take budding stars from the late 1980s and insert them as centerpieces of the network’s new Tuesday night comedy block. However, unlike many sitcoms of its ilk, The Grinder has the potential to be a really entertaining little sitcom; it just needs to decide which of its many identities it really wants to be.
I see a number of potential shows in The Grinder, tucked inside the broad premise of Dean Sanderson Jr. (Rob Lowe), famous television actor, coming home to Boise, Idaho, to live with his brother (and real lawyer) Stewart Sanderson (Fred Savage) and family. Within that, there are many things the pilot offers us as potential avenues: a goofy, semi-satirical comedy about celebrity obsession, an Odd Couple story about brothers forming a legal team, or a comedy centered on two generations of Sanderson men reinforcing their familial bonds. “Pilot” wants to be all of those things – and while it’s mildly effective at all of them, the lack of focus ultimately limits the potential impact of this first episode, which already suffers from the usual self-affirming moments of most comedies, where people hug a lot and be very, very explicit about their feelings for everything and anything.
Despite that crisis of identity, “Pilot” is fairly entertaining, hitching itself to the existential crisis Dean faces in the first episode to find some much-needed pathos in the third act. Dean is such a confident, meticulously crafted persona that watching the actor fall away and the desperate brother come forth as the pilot continues is very effective, even when it fails to differentiate itself from typical genre convention. Lowe’s Dean goes through all the necessary steps to find his path in life: he watches his brother fail, he saves the day, then his brother resigns to bringing him back on a weekly basis, if only for 22 minutes at a time. The tried and true formula isn’t really touched here, so why does it work so well in this specific case?
The answer is simple: chemistry. Few shows are able to find chemistry in their first episode, but Lowe, Savage (who is fantastic in his return to acting), Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and William Devane form a wonderful nucleus for the show, naturally sliding into banter with each other, and displaying the shared comedic timing of old hands working on their 100th episode. As constructed and nonsensical as it all feels, The Grinder doesn’t have to force audiences to hear and feel its beating heart, a welcome refresher, particularly in this year’s collection of mostly bland, inspiration-less offerings. The material isn’t quite focused enough, but the strong foundation is quite prominent, carrying the episode through its cliches and conventions with ease, and letting the performers bring their energy to delivering the comedy, itself an entertaining (and fairly) safe endeavor for the show’s first half hour.
It’s hard to present a particularly compelling case why this pilot stands apart from the rest: studying its vitals would suggest it’s the same as dozens of other shows in recent memory, a number of which presented themselves with much stronger pilots. But a good pilot does not a series make, and the blueprint for The Grinder is an amalgamation mix of elements that, while none of them necessarily clash with each other, are all too loud and too prominent, to the point they all basically cancel each other out. Once (and if) The Grinder finds a direction, it has the potential to be a great show. It certainly has the right cast in place, which may be the hardest thing for a pilot to find, definitely a promising sign for an otherwise pedestrian pilot episode.
[Photo credit: Ray Mickshaw/FOX]
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