Grand (TV Series) - Premise

Premise

Grand was a comedy of manners, satirizing three social classes in rural Pennsylvania. The wealthy upper class was represented by Harris Weldon, founder of the town of Grand and owner of the Weldon Piano Works. Weldon lived in a mansion with his shiftless ne'er-do-well son, Norris, and his Jeevesish manservant, Desmond. The middle class was represented by Weldon's niece, Carol Ann Smithson and her husband Tom who had moved to Grand so Tom could begin a management job at the piano works, but from which he was fired by Harris on his first day. The lower working class was represented by cleaning lady Janice Pasetti, a single mother raising her teenage daughter Edda in a travel trailer.

Grand mocked soap opera conventions by featuring numerous story arcs which carried through several episodes, most notably Harris' attempts in the first season to secure a date to take to a ceremony honoring him at Carnegie Hall, Janice's struggle to come to terms with her divorce while fending off the amorous attentions of police officer Wayne Kazmurski, Tom's attempts to first hide from Carol Ann the fact that he had a teenaged son from a previous marriage and then his attempts to integrate the son into their lives, and Harris allowing Desmond to believe that he was actually Norris's father, although Harris knew it was not true. The pseudo-soap-opera format was abandoned after the second episode of Season 2, but resumed in the series' final four episodes. A 26th episode was filmed but never aired.

Grand was the story of three interconnected families. It was more of a satire of soap operas (to the point where it could be termed a "soap operetta") than it was a traditional situation comedy; the program often mocked the conventions of soap opera. The three families were the wealthy Weldons, the impoverished Pasetis, and the middle class Smithsons.

The Weldons were the wealthiest family in the small town of Grand, Pennsylvania; they owned the largest industry, a piano factory which was starting to fall on hard times due to the declining sales of its pianos, a situation that patriarch Harris Weldon (John Randolph) blamed on Asian imports. In Weldon's household were his dimwitted son, Norris (Joel Murray) and the acerbic butler, Desmond (John Neville), whom Weldon kept despite his acid tongue as he had once been responsible for saving Weldon's life. Weldon's housekeeper Janice Paseti (Pamela Reed) barely scraped by on what Weldon paid her; she lived in a mobile home with her obese daughter, Edda (Sara Rue). In between these two extremes were Weldon's niece Carole Ann Smithson (Bonnie Hunt) and her husband Tom (Michael McKean), who was constantly hoping to improve his financial position by getting a position, preferably an executive one, at his wife's uncle's factory.

This program was less successful than the somewhat similar Soap, which had also featured an acid-tongued butler and mocked many of the same soap opera conventions; Grand ran from January to December 1990 (with breaks in May and September) prior to its cancellation.