Read

Fox’s The Grinder (2015) is the latest in a long history of show-within-a-show television. Just as there are countless books with a writer as the main character, the people behind the scenes creating television have a penchant for featuring themselves in their fictions, mining their own professional experiences for satire, conflict, and, of course, drama. Although The Grinder is part of this self-reflexive television tradition, it sets itself apart in its approach and philosophy, which reflect the metamodernism school of art and criticism.

In the ‘60s, Rob Petrie, Dick Van Dyke’s character on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961), went to work every day as a writer on “The Alan Brady Show.” Fast forward to the ‘90s for the arrival of the first of Garry Shandling’s show-within-a-show entries, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986), which stretched the sitcom genre to a very ironic and postmodern place. Shandling’s next meta-theatrical series was The Larry Sanders Show (1992), which, in many ways, shares more in common with Van Dyke than Shandling, using Hollywood’s overblown personalities, the vanities of on-air talent, and harried producers as narrative fodder.

Community (2009), Dan Harmon’s viewer-challenged but cult-classic sitcom, is a closer relative to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, even without the use of the show-within-a-show trope. Abed, one of the core characters in the show’s study group, often frames the group’s interactions with familiar tropes from television and movies. Abed’s inability to always properly assess social situations forces him to lean on his encyclopedic pop culture knowledge to understand the relationships between and amongst him and the other members of the study group. In this way the tropes are not just framing the story for the real-life viewer but also for one of the fictional characters. Harmon and the creative team use this duality to examine the audience’s relationship with TV and film and how that relationship does or does not accurately reflect or influence real human interaction. There is an honesty to the fondness for the pop culture references, even as the writers are poking fun.

Of course the tropes on Community are played for immediate laughs, but also work as intelligent satire in much the same way that It’s Gary Shandling’s Show would send up the real/unreal nature of situation comedy. However, where Shandling had the ironic and self-aware distance of postmodernism, Community’s take falls more into a more metamodernist place, balancing the distance with a sincere closeness for the material

Aimee Cliff, in a piece about Weird Al for Fader, described metamodernism as “a movement of art and criticism that takes itself seriously and also doesn’t—it’s all the ironic distance and excruciating self-awareness of postmodernism with all the open-spirited capacity for enjoyment that came before. It’s about being enlightened and also light.”

The Grinder fits easily into this world of metamodernism by poking fun at the tried-and-true standard legal drama while, at the same time, embracing the earnestness and nobility of its tropes. Rob Lowe, the eponymous Grinder, is struggling with his post-television identity, and each episode begins with scenes from “The Grinder,” which set up a framework for that week’s story and conflict.

In the first episode, Lowe’s Dean returns home to Idaho and his family: his brother, his brother’s family, and their father. Dean wants to work at the family law firm, despite not being a real lawyer, and in the world of The Grinder (both the show and the show-within-the-show) he doesn’t let actual laws get in his way. After watching the series finale with his family, he asks, “Did it feel real to you as lawyers?” His brother Stewart, played by Fred Savage as the straight man to Dean’s Grinder, replies, “It’s felt as real as all of the other ones.”

Dean is insufferable in his cluelessness and touching in his sincerity. He is a living, breathing symbol of the false and hyperbolic world of television legal dramas. Despite his shortcomings, he is charming in his efforts to bring that experience into the ‘real’ legal world of the family law firm. This is precisely what Cliff was talking about in her description of metamodernism. As viewers, we have distance from Dean’s show, The Grinder, and can recognize its formulaic ridiculousness. Nevertheless, we - through Stewart as our straight-guy stand-in - are rooting for Dean, even if Stewart doesn’t always realize it on the actual show.

The Grinder is both an astute comment on television tropes and a sentimental family and office comedy. It plays with the tropes of genres, its own and that of its show-within-a-show, blurring the lines without ever turning on itself and becoming bitter. It relishes its own fuzzy edges.

As Todd, the bumbling associate at the firm who idolizes Dean, says in an on-the-nose line about Dean’s excitement and earnestness and his character’s own literal reality, “I feel like I’m in a Grinder episode right now!”