Rob Lowe is ready to go for Wednesday’s Season 3 finale of his Fox competition series, “The Floor.” Three seasons in and the host is confident he can end this thing with a bang that will have viewers coming back for Season 4, which is already in development at the broadcast network.
“The thing that you love the most about ‘The Floor’ is anything can happen,” Lowe told Variety. “Somebody can come out of nowhere. Somebody who’s built a huge area on the floor can go down in an instant. And we obviously have a ‘Jeopardy!’ champion that nobody wants to screw around with, and probably for good reason. But I would just say it’s always best, when in doubt, to expect the unexpected.”
“The Floor” keeps Lowe in the Fox family following the end of “9-1-1: Lone Star,” the spinoff of ABC’s first-responder procedural “9-1-1” (which also began as a Fox series). Lowe starred on “Lone Star” until it ended its five-season run in February, but he says he is still keeping tabs on the “9-1-1” universe after his own show’s conclusion.
Yes, that means he saw the shocking death of (spoiler alert) Peter Krause’s “9-1-1” character, Captain Bobby Nash, on last week’s episode. Lowe praised the “brilliant” choice by showrunner Tim Minear, who along with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk created both series.
“I watched it and thought it was beautifully written, beautifully acted. Peter is a spectacular actor,” Lowe said. “At a certain point in a show like that, and Tim has said this publicly, every once in a while, you’ve got to knock down a few walls if you want to keep the house structure sound. Ironically, it might rejuvenate the show into a whole new area, but it will never be the same without Peter who was, from the beginning, just such an amazing actor. And the way he played that death scene was emblematic of his nuance and subtlety. I’ve just always been a fan of what he and Angela and the rest of the cast do on that show, definitely.”
“9-1-1” and the now-ended spinoff “Lone Star” are both known for teasing the deaths of main characters, but always bringing them through to safety in the end — until Bobby’s death last week. Lowe himself almost saw his character, Captain Owen Strand, die in the series finale of “Lone Star” — but that was another fake-out.
“See, ‘9-1-1,’ they get to keep their show. Peter goes but the show remains,” Lowe says. “It would have been too much if Owen Strand died and the show did.”
While Lowe keeps hosting Fox’s “The Floor” as he considers his next scripted project, he’s got a good sense of humor about the other actors he’s up against for roles in the industry — like John Stamos, whom a Hollywood tour guide mistook him for recently.
“That was so flipping funny. It was a great,” Lowe says, recalling the moment, which he shared in a video on social media. “So my son just always gives me such grief about that. And I was like, ‘I’m sure I’m being punked by my son again.’ Turns out, it wasn’t.”
Lowe says he’s used to this comparison, which he’s been hearing since his film “St. Elmo’s Fire” and Stamos’ “Full House” both came out in the late ’80s.
“It’s what I thought when I saw the first episode of ‘Full House,’” Lowe said. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, they went to ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ and they’re like, ‘We want that guy. That guy is busy? OK, we’ll take that guy.’”
For now, he’s focused on “The Floor,” which he says will unveil its fourth season plans at Fox’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York next month.
“The future is bright and long. We like to look at it as, hopefully, Fox’s ‘Survivor’ that can go for a very, very long time and but also a show that doesn’t rest on its laurels,” Lowe said. “There are ways every year to add another wrinkle, ways that just accentuate the core simplicity of what people like. And each year, we have found a new wrinkle. This year was the time boost. We have a couple of new ones for next season that I think are spectacular. It’s like, why didn’t we think of this before? And we’ll be unveiling that when we unveil at the upfront, but it’s just another way to keep people reimagining the game, even if they’ve been fans of it since the beginning.”
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