The press tour from Topher to bell-bottom

By Manuel Mendoza / The Dallas Morning News

LOS ANGELES - From the Fox "press tour" party at trendy Perino's, five minutes with ...

* Topher Grace - Don't ask him about the bell-bottoms. He's sick of talking about the bell-bottoms.

Anyway, That '70s Show isn't really about the decade in which it's set, according to Mr. Grace's "thesis."

The show-biz newcomer - plucked from a high school play by producers Bonnie and Terry Turner - plays Eric Foreman, the adventurous though ultimately level-headed teenager at the center of the Sunday night Fox sitcom.

In the pilot, Eric takes his father's car out of town without permission, except Dad knows exactly what's going on: a rite of passage. And unlike Ward Cleaver, he doesn't mind.

"He doesn't catch me. In fact, he knows I'm taking it, and then this girl kisses me at the end for having done something daring," Mr. Grace says during an impromptu interview by the dessert table.

"It's the conventional '70s sitcom, but at the end the twist is the father doesn't come out and say, 'See, the car is broken down. That's why you shouldn't steal a car.' ... The moral of the show is very '90s."

Mr. Grace, one of the stars attending Fox's fete for TV critics in town to preview new programs, credits the Turners for twisting the '70s premise so that it has relevance today.

He cites their other projects for doing the same: 3rd Rock From the Sun ("That's not about aliens, it's about humans") and Wayne's World ("That wasn't about a couple of losers sitting in their basement, it was about two chivalrous gentlemen").

That '70s Show was initially noticed for an early pot-smoking scene. It caused a minor stink at last summer's TV press tour.

Put on the defensive, the producers said they were being realistic about the era, while Fox just tried to play it down. Both said they would rarely inhale again. Then a funny thing happened.

"The network made us cut a little bit of the scene out of the pilot, but then when it got such high ratings, they asked us to put in pot scenes," Mr. Grace says. "The executive producers were saying, 'No, that's gratuitous.' "

He is particularly proud of the way the show pushes physical boundaries with low-tech special effects, whether it's a wall swinging like a pendulum to represent a stoner's point of view or the camera circling a dinner-table discussion to create a sense of familial claustrophobia.

"We have an episode coming up where the whole episode is me trying to take Donna's bra off, and how tough that is. Literally, at one point, I'm leaning over her shoulder and there's this huge combination lock. ... It's all Ed Wood stuff," Mr. Grace says, referring to the kitschy '50s film director of Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The bra episode, called "The Pill," airs Feb. 21 and completes a story arc that began last Sunday when Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) had sex with Jackie (Mila Kunis), the girlfriend he's been trying to dump all season in one of the show's running gags.

"I think the last episode of the show is going to be - we all joke around about this - him at the altar with us as his best men and he's still saying, 'I'm going to dump her.' "