Love That Chris

It may just be my schoolboy crush on the radiant Megyn Price, but I find myself looking forward to Grounded for Life, a vehicle for The Tao of Steve star Donal Logue and the season‘s second young-parent(s)-of-a-teenager series (after Gilmore Girls). Grounded, in which Price plays wife to Logue, bears the mark of Fox (it comes from the producers of That ’70s Show), being loud and crude, teeming with invective and insult, and unafraid of a drug joke or three -- a show that posits vandalizing a nun‘s car as a form of father-daughter bonding. We are given to understand, however, as in The Simpsons and Married With Children and Malcolm in the Middle, that what looks like dysfunction is really a deep form of understanding. You have met these people before: the grumpy old dad (see: Titus), the wacky brother (see: any sitcom with a brother in it), the smart-mouthed teenage daughter (ditto), the confused younger siblings (and so on). The central question of the show, which is also not new, is how do you raise your kids to be smarter and less reckless than you were when you’re still half in love with dumb recklessness? ”I don‘t want to be the kind of guy who scolds his kid for getting drunk at Action Mountain,“ says Logue, having gone there to fetch his errant daughter. ”I wanna be the guy getting drunk at Action Mountain.“ I don’t make any great claims for the series -- the grumpy dad annoys me, the plots are twisted versions of plots sitcom characters have been living out since time immemorial (or the ‘50s at least), the daughter is strident, and the laugh track makes me want to vomit. But the wacky brother is the great Kevin Corrigan (Slums of Beverly Hills), and Logue and Price have a natural rapport -- they seem genuinely amused by and attracted to each other, which from his point of view I can absolutely understand. And he’s not bad either.