Lowe's new ITV drama Wild Bill, in which he plays an American police chief from Boston who relocates to Lincolnshire, England, premiered this week. Lowe said he decided to take a chance on a small-scale British show in response to the cancelations of his Fox sitcom The Grinder in 2016 and CBS medical drama Code Black in 2018. "I remember saying – and I still believe – that I'm incapable of doing a better comedy than The Grinder," he says. "Honestly, I'll never find better scripts, better partners on both sides of the camera, with a more interesting, original concept executed as brilliantly as that show. But at the end of the day, by network television standards, it didn't work. So I found myself at a place where I was like, 'I don't know what else they want from me.' So the notion of coming and working for ITV on such a smaller-scale, limited, off the beaten path (was very appealing)." He says of Wild Bill: "There's no frame of it that would ever be seen on an American network. Streaming, maybe. But you would never in a billion years see this on Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, TNT, FX. It completely was a palate cleanser for me, both creatively and in terms of the experience." ALSO: Rob Lowe joins Andy Samberg, Richard Gere, Jeremy Piven, Julia Stiles and Michael C. Hall as American actors who crossed the pond to British TV.
TOPICS: Rob Lowe, ITV, Code Black, The Grinder, Wild Bill