Kelsey Grammer Relives the 'Back to You' Nightmare

[Brian Damage]

What happened with Back to You and were you ready to jump right back in and try again?

We started on Back to You. Good show, Patricia Heaton. I enjoyed her immensely. I thought we had a really great chemistry, and I thought we actually were onto something pretty good. Then FOX hired what's his name, Reilly? Hired Reilly, who actually hadn't bought the show. We had pitched it to him at NBC. So I had bad feelings about that. Then we had the writers' strike. And the writers' strike I really think, well, basically we sort of like preempted the recession for ourselves and got in there six months early. I was very happy about that. We were rehearsing for the real recession. There was very little ability, especially on FOX anyway, to kind of have a sense of continuity about the show and a sense of commitment because that's just kind of the way they work with shows. It's their thing. And we were at sea pretty much once Idol came on. And finally, there was some friction between the guy that never wanted the show in the first place, who was now running FOX, and our writers. And off we went. Then there was a heart attack, and there was the idea that maybe we would toy with the idea of going back to something. But I thought, and I said this to my agent, I said, "Listen, I haven't seen a traditional family show in a long time on television. You know, what happened to them? They're still part of America, I think." So that became the area that I was interested in. I was pitched one other thing about a successful 50-year-old guy that was always trying to score with teenage women and I just thought, "This is really awful." I thought it's bound to be something someone would want to pick up, but I said, "I will not put myself in that show." Then somebody responded to the idea of a family. This fellow came in the room and started talking about it. So I survived a turgid pitch, and I heard the one line that made me think, "That, I can play, and that would be interesting, and it would be fun." And Tucker [Cawley] has a pretty good track record. He's got some funny ideas and a very droll manner. I thought, "That's interesting."


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