‘The Grinder’ Review: Rob Lowe, Fred Savage And Lots of Lawyerly Laughs

The latter-day career of Rob Lowe has been defined by the role he took in Amy Poehler’s Parks and Recreation. As Chris Traeger, the assiduously upbeat auditor, Lowe was able to move ever-further away from his Brat Pack past, and infuse his best post-Brat role — Sam Seaborn on The West Wing — with the kind of humor that made him something this skilled but impeccably controlled actor hadn’t brought to full bloom before: Lovability.

Now, as Dean Sanderson, Jr. in the season’s funniest fall pilot The Grinder, Lowe is able to broaden out his comedy. Playing a vain TV actor is no stretch for a guy as good-looking as Lowe, whose face is less chiseled than smoothed to a glossy sheen. But there’s a danger in playing vanity for laughs — such characters need an additional, more unassuming and modest character to keep the egotist in check. If 30 Rock had only been a show about Jenna Maroney, she would have been too, too much, but she was great as a contrast to Liz Lemon. If Veronica’s Closet had been only about Kirstie Alley’s Veronica, she… oh, wait: bad example.

In The Grinder, Lowe’s Dean has a great opposite-number character: Fred Savage as Stewart Sanderson, Dean’s sad-sack small-town-lawyer brother. The premise, you’ve probably gathered from the ads, is that after his hit lawyer show The Grinder ends its run, Dean decides on a whim to return home and reconnect with the common people — i.e., his family — and in the process realizes that Stewart’s stalled courtroom career needs a little of the old razzle-dazzle Dean Grinder character brought to his dramatically persuasive pitches to juries.

The show is very smart. It recognizes our current cultural condition, in which people who become famous acquire undeserved credibility in anything they do (you’re not going to catch me using Donald Trump as an example here, so I’ll just say: James Franco, poet?). In the premiere, Dean decides his TV-lawyer role has equipped him sufficiently to try a case that Stewart is too obviously losing. And people in the jury and courtroom totally buy into his schtick, much to the dismay of good, plodding, ethical Stewart.

In this role, Savage is excellent. Since The Wonder Years, Savage hasn’t done a lot of acting, instead becoming a very good TV director (everything from Modern Family to Party Down); in his middle age, he’s developed a hangdog expression he can use to express comic despair, depression, and general bafflement and dismay.

And boy, is Stewart ever dismayed that Dean is better at pretending to be a lawyer than Stewart is at being a lawyer. To say nothing of that fact that the boys’ father (William Devane, taking time out from peddling gold on cable-news commercials to do what he does best: smile toothily with slyness) thinks the prodigal son has returned to save the family law firm.

There was a ripple of alarm when it was announced this summer that The Grinder had replaced its show-runner after this terrific pilot episode. (Greg Malins is out; The Comedians’ Ben Wexler is in.) So now more than ever, we need to temper enthusiasm with a careful look-see at the next few weeks’ editions, to see whether the show can maintain its joke-packed yet also character-rich blend. Hey, no matter what happens it’ll still be funnier than Undateable, right?

The Grinder airs Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox.