Rob Lowe calls playing a cop on British TV a "palate cleanser"

Digital Spy

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.