TV Review : ‘The Preston Episodes’: A Promising Outing for Grier

David Alan Grier affirms in “The Preston Episodes� what he demonstrated in “In Living Color�: that he’s one of TV’s most talented and versatile comic actors.

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No wonder, then, that the premiere of “The Preston Episodes� is so inviting. Grier plays David Preston, a divorced, 37-year-old former English professor (his parents are also academics) whose quest for a serious writing job in New York lands him at Stuff, a tabloid magazine that values pictures and flashy headlines, not literary skill.

After the humiliation of being rejected for a job at a publishing firm by one of his ex-students, whom he flunked, Preston finds himself reluctantly presenting his resume to Stuff’s English-born editor, Larry Dunhill (Clive Revill), who is mightily impressed: “You got brains, you got class, you got integrity. I can’t use you.�

But, of course, after Preston aggressively imposes himself, Dunhill does hire him. Rest assured, however, that he will resist his new employee’s attempt to curtail Stuff’s voracious appetite for drivel and use it as a launching pad for his career as a great writer.

Preston’s oddball next-door neighbor (Tommy Hinkley) wears thin, but his moments with Dunhill and Kelly Freeman (Judith Scott), a former award-winning writer now at Stuff, yield some amusing results in a premiere that is likable and just funny enough to interest you in tuning in again.

* “The Preston Episodes� premieres at 8:30 tonight on Fox (Channel 11).