"What does it mean, 'to grind' asks Dean Sanderson's (
Rob Lowe) new therapist, played by guest star
Maya Ruldoph.
Dean responds, "Doing whatever it takes to find justice, no matter how hard the grind... and the grind is the everyday struggle."
FOX took a chance this season with a
sitcom called The Grinder (not the Grindr) about adult brothers who
start (reluctantly) working together in a law practice. Have we seen this type of plot before? Of course….
(Hyperion Bay with Mark Paul Gosselaar >comes to mind). The difference in this show is all in the casting. The brothers are
two of my beloved 80’s and 90’s actors. I could not be more excited for Fred Savage’s (Stewart) return to acting and the return of Lowe to comedy. This is Savage's first foray away from the director's chair since the sitcom, Working (1997-1999).
Let it be known that while I favored his real life brother
Ben Savage (Cory from
Boy/Girl Meets World for many years, I am back on Team Fred when it comes to choosing which Savage I love. Savage's Stewart runs Sanderson and Yao, a law firm in Boise, Idaho, a firm started by his dad, Dean Sanderson, Sr. (
William Devane). Dean Sr. is ticked to have his son home after Dean Jr.'s many successful seasons as TV lawyer, Mitch Grinder.
Mitch Grinder is his own unique character. Rob Lowe does what he does best here:
he plays an actor playing a lawyer, and both characters are a bit self-indulgent. It’s basically the best of teen Rob Lowe’s boyish charm (
St. Elmo’s Fire, The Outsiders) and adult Rob Lowe’s
commitment to
#truthandjustice mixed together (
The West Wing,The Lyon's Den,
Brothers and Sisters). The scenes from the show with a show are pretty dramatic with emotional outbursts, clawing out of a coffin in the ground, romantic trysts on the confrence table, and the last-minute proclamation that "grinds" (pun intended) the case to a swift halt. In every episode of the show, the Sanderson men, along with Stewart's wife Debbie (
Mary Elizabeth Ellis, the waitress from
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and teen kids, watch episodes of "
The Grinder" and Dean shares his motivation for the episode, with ridiculous things like getting a teenage son in one episode to show his character's emotional depth.
In the episode first mentioned above, Dean's therapist suggests that in order for Dean to move forward in life (or at least move out of his brother's house), he has to let "
The Grinder" die. This should be simple because in the new reboot of the show,
Grinder: New Orleans, Dean guest stars to give his new TV brother Rake (played by
Timothy Olyphant) some advice, and decides his character must die to complete his character arc. This plan took some convincing and entailed a very confusing courtroom scene where Stu showed up as their third long-lost brother and also offered to die on the show, via poison. As for
Olyphant, he has done some great work playing a Hollywood version of himself, making Dean look a little more human and sparking a romantic triangle (at least in Dean's eyes) with Sanderson and Yao's associate, Claire. Other guest stars have included
Christina Applegate as a closeted fan pretending she had never seen Dean's show,
Jim Rash as a potential client,
Jason Alexander as "
The Grinder" director.
“We watch
The Grinder, we talk about it while we’re watching it, and after we’re watching it,
and it feels to me like we should operate more in reality.” - Stu
“Were you at the bar this whole time, just waiting to interject at the perfect moment?”
- Client (Jim Rash) to Dean
