Grier took a funny route to the hospital

David Alan Grier has finally entered his family legacy, working in a hospital.
Alas, it took him 68 years to get there. Also, it’s fictional.
Grier (shown here) stars in “St. Denis,” a hospital comedy from the “Superstore” and “American Auto” people. It debuts at 8 and 8:30 p.m. Tuesday on NBC, with Grier as a doctor he describes as “an old curmudgeon,” surrounded by people who are younger and more frantic.
And that medical setting should sort of fit. Grier’s father was a psychiatrist; most of the offspring followed suit. “My brothers and sisters – psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, mental health,” he told the Television Critics Association. “That was all part of my upbringing …. I grew up around Black doctors.”
His dad co-authored the groundbreaking book “Black Rage”; home was a serious setting. “When he disciplined me,” Grier said, “I never got the psychiatrist voice. I got the dad voice, which was was: ‘Stop doing that.’”
But elsewhere, “I was a class clown.” There were conflicting expectations.
“I grew up: ‘Don’t do that. Be quiet. Just go to business school ‘…. My contemporaries were doctors, lawyers, dentists.”
Instead, he majored in radio, TV and film at the University of Michigan, then went on to Yale School of Drama and Broadway. He had lots of serious roles (including starring as Jackie Robinson in a musical), but Keenen Ivory Wayans cast him in a comedy film and the “In Living Color” sketch show.
“David Alan Grier is a guy who was just born to be a comedian,” Wayans said in the show’s companion book (Warner, 1990). “He is innately funny. When he is not saying anything, you’ll laugh/”
Still, he can also be serious. He’s done “A Soldier’s Play” twice (38 years apart), winning a Tony the second time, plus the film, “A Soldier’s Play.”
And now he’s doing comedy in a serious place. A hospital “is where people haves some of the most important moments of their lives,” said co-creator Eric Ledgin. “It’s also … where some of the funniest moments take place.”
We meet lota of characters. At the front are the chief nurse (Allison Tolman, from the first “Fargo” mini-series), the executive director (Wendi McLendon-Covey of “The Goldbergs” … and the droll curmudgeon.