Topher Grace on Recapturing the Magic of That '70s Show With Home Economics

Topher Grace hasn't starred in a network comedy in more than 15 years, but he has high hopes for his big return with ABC's Home Economics.

By Lauren Piester Apr 15, 2021 12:00 AMTags
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Back when he was cast in That '70s Show, his first sitcom, Topher Grace was just a kid who had been in one high school play. 

As he prepared to launch his second sitcom, Home Economics, more than 20 years later, Grace was an executive producer with two decades of movie roles under his belt, and he was still thinking about That '70s Show. He was the first person cast in the new ABC comedy, and he happily jumped in to help cast the rest of the show, with hopes of capturing a familiar feeling.

"I wanted [Home Economics] to be like Ocean's Eleven, where they go and get just, like, the best team ever," he tells E! News over a Zoom call. "Because I've been on a dream team." 

While Grace did make cameos as himself in both Ocean's Eleven and Twelve, he's actually referring to the lightning-in-a-bottle cast of That '70s Show, most of whom were relatively new to the business at the time. Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Laura Prepon, Wilmer Valderrama and Danny Masterson felt like real best friends, and it made for TV magic. 

"It's like dating," Grace says. "It's just so rare that it comes together for two people. Imagine five people or six people having that chemistry! But I could see the possibility was there [with Home Economics]. It's just a dream team of actors." 

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Grace stars as Tom, the oldest of three lovable siblings. He's the middle-class brother, a failed novelist with a former attorney wife (Karla Souza) and brand-new twins, who is secretly writing a book about his family. His sister Sarah, played by Caitlin McGee, is barely making ends meet, but is happy with her wife (Sasheer Zamata) and two kids. 

Youngest sibling Connor (Jimmy Tatro) is rich as hell thanks to his private equity firm and is now a single dad, since his wife left him. And yeah, Grace feels like he did what he was hoping to do with this cast. 

"You still don't know until you're all together, so the first or second day, I was a little nervous, but then I got overconfident so fast," he remembers. "There's no weak link. It's a murderer's row." 

ABC

He wasn't trying to recreate That '70s Show, of course, but there are naturally comparisons to be drawn since Grace hasn't done a whole lot on the small screen since he left that show in 2005. He's made appearances on various TV shows and did a couple of mini-series and many movies, but most recently, his career had taken a somewhat strange turn. 

After his "amazing" experience on That '70s Show, he decided he wanted to do "everything," which meant "huge movies, small movies, good guys, bad guys." In 2018, he played one of the worst guys: Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke in the movie BlacKkKlansman. That was followed by a turn as a tech CEO and villain in a 2019 episode of Black Mirror, and Grace found himself getting some weird offers.

"I thought, maybe I've gone a little too far. All the scripts are getting rougher, like white supremacists and Neo Nazis," he recalls. "Maybe I'm too far in one direction, and it happens to be the polar opposite of Eric Foreman, but I have nothing against Eric Foreman." 

Saying yes to Home Economics wasn't exactly about going back in the direction of Eric Foreman, but it was the right script at the right time and in the right kind of place. 

"My agent sent it to me without a cover page, so I didn't know where it was. I was just reading it as a piece of material and thought it was really sharp and funny," he says. "And when they said it wasn't on streaming, I went like, oh yeah, I guess there weren't any swears in that, but it still felt kind of dangerous and cool." 

 

Not being on streaming, it turns out, was a big part of why the show appealed to Grace, especially considering its subject matter. A show about the spectrum of economic statuses shouldn't only be available to people who can afford to pay extra for certain shows. 

"The whole point of the show is that it's not exclusive," he says. "And I think if you were to do that on streaming, some people might not realize that that would be excluding some of the audience." 

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Just like That '70s Show could actually reach someone's "mother-in-law who lives in Wisconsin," Grace is hoping for the same reach for Home Economics, especially after the global pandemic we're all still currently living through. The pilot was first cast before the pandemic, and then didn't get to go into production before the world shut down, leaving Grace and the rest of the cast and crew to wonder if viewers would still want their show after such a catastrophe. 

"As the pandemic went, I thought, 'Oh, I think it's going to change what the world wants to see when everyone comes outside,' and then I went, 'Oh no, this is actually even more relevant,'" he says. "It just became more about class and where you are socioeconomically." 

It helped that so much of the show could come from a very real place. It was created by Michael Colton and John Aboud, based on Colton's real life. Many moments from the show are lifted directly from Colton's own experiences, and the cast can contribute, too. 

Grace plays a dad with young kids and a creative job, and in real life, he's a dad with two young kids and a creative job. Whether you've got twins, as his character does, or just one kid at a time, "it all feels the same," he says. "You're underwater and you're just trying to hang on, raise these kids and not mess up." 

"I really identified with this guy, like he's trying to do his creative passion," he continues. "You want to indulge your creative impulses, but then there are the very real impulses of the real world, and it's made a lot more real by having kids."

Grace, who shares a 3-year-old and an 8-month-old with actress Ashley Grace, says he really wishes he had listened to all the advice he got before having kids, because parenthood was nothing like he imagined. 

"It's such a shift in your life and how you look at the world and other people who are parents," he says.  

ABC

The show is framed with Tom's voiceover, all bits of the new book he's secretly writing, which will cause some "chaos" later in the season. Grace has never done narration like that before, and while he really likes that framing device, he also sees it as a way to show that Tom is "learning something." 

TV sitcoms sometimes have to be careful sometimes with how much their characters learn so the show can keep up its premise for as long as possible, but Grace points out that, as they eventually did on That '70s Show, characters also have to change to keep the audience interested. Hopefully, Home Economics has got some time to stew on that front. 

The star says he did a bit of a "sitcom prep course" before he jumped back into comedy, and he found that not a whole lot has changed in terms of what's good. All you have to do to prove that is take a look at one of 2021's buzziest new shows, a sitcom send-up that also happened to feature Grace's former TV mom, Debra Jo Rupp, AKA Kitty (who, he says, "crushed it" in every way possible). 

"I still think I Love Lucy's the greatest show on TV right now...The stuff that's good on TV is timeless," says Grace. "I was thinking about it when I was watching WandaVision. There's not one of those decades that doesn't still work, and that's why that show works." 

Home Economics may be a single-cam portrait of America in 2021, but if the jokes are as good and the cast is as much of a dream as Grace feels they are, maybe it can become timeless too. 

Home Economics airs Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. on ABC.