As Trump Goes, So Goes Tim Allen
Their career trajectories are linked
Great news, “Last Man Standing” fans! The red state-friendly, family sitcom has returned once more, after first being canceled by ABC in 2017, despite six years of solid ratings. It was then brought back in 2018 by Fox, which produced the series through its entire run.
Sharp-eyed viewers will notice some differences, however. First, while casting changes are nothing new to the show, only Tim Allen is returning for the latest reboot. None of the other cast members from the first nine seasons were brought back.
But, while there is no Kristen, Mandy or Eve Baxter, the famous daughters of Mike Baxter, Allen’s LMS character, the new version does feature the never before seen or mentioned eldest Baxter daughter Riley, who has two kids and is estranged from her husband.
Also, Mike appears to be in some sort of fugue state, as he has moved to California and believes he’s a widowed auto restoration shop owner named Matt Parker. Disturbingly, Riley, her children and Matt’s employees perpetuate his disassociation….
Ok, if you didn’t know already, you’ve probably figured out that LMS is not really returning. The show described is actually “Shifting Gears,” Allen’s newest sitcom in which he really is Matt Parker. And his daughter Riley (Kat Dennings) is Riley Parker, who had left home years ago and cut off contact with her father—until the series premiere, when she shows up with his grandchildren because they have no other place else to go.
But, seriously, those details aside, it’s the same show. Dennings wasn’t only cast because of her “Two Broke Girls” fan base and trademark spunk. With her dark locks, she really could have been the prodigal Baxter daughter, or at least the wayward cousin who leads the brunette Baxter sisters to the wild side.
“Changing Gears” has swapped out the wilderness emporium Outdoor Man for Matt’s Autoworks as the business run by Allen’s character and the show’s workplace setting. Although, it should be noted, that, in the later seasons of LMS, Mike Baxter and two of his Outdoor Man employees start a classic car restoration business on the side.
Meanwhile, Matt Parker is—wait for it—a cranky conservative. Also, his daughter is a liberal.
Politics, thankfully, is at least less front and center than it was on LMS. Mike Baxter promoted Outdoor Man with a series of Fox News-style video rants. Matt Parker mostly mutters comments in response to the TV, radio and things his family says and does.
Mike Baxter and Matt Parker—along with the apolitical Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor from “Home Improvement”—are extensions of Allen himself (Allen says Parker is the closest version). And Allen, famously, is not just one of Hollywood’s few open Republicans and conservatives, but also an avowed Trump supporter.
The actor believes that his political beliefs were responsible for the original cancellation of LMS. "There is nothing more dangerous to me, especially in this climate, than a funny, likable conservative," Allen said in a September 2017 appearance on the podcast “Norm Macdonald Live,” several months after his series’ non-renewal had been announced.
ABC was cagey about the role Allen’s politics played in the cancellation. Channing Dungey, then president of ABC Entertainment, told reporters at the time that Allen’s outspoken views weren’t “the deciding factor,” framing the move as primarily a business and scheduling decision. Dungey acknowledged, though, that the tense American political atmosphere at that moment did play a role in the network’s programming decisions. “There’s a lot of news, and I think that people are definitely looking to television as a place they want to feel, they want to laugh, they want to cry,” she said. “The mood of the country has told us that television is a little bit of an escape.”
Translation: Allen’s right-wing tirades were fine when he was merely the stridently vocal opposition, yelling about Obama. But, now Allen’s guy, Trump, was in the White House. Mike Baxter’s diatribes suddenly seemed a little too real.
Patricia Richardson, Allen’s “Home Improvement” co-star, believes Allen’s outspoken conservatism is the reason why their own show hasn’t had the cultural staying power of some other long-running 90s sitcoms. “I think it’s about Tim and about his politics,” she told the LA Times last year. “Of course, I don’t like his politics,” she added, though that didn’t stop her from reuniting with Allen to guest-star on LMS.
Fans launched multiple online petitions to bring back the Baxter bunch after ABC shut them down. The one that got the most traction got over 400,000 signatures.
But, it was ABC’s successful revival of “Roseanne,” another long-tenured late-20th century sitcom, that convinced Fox to put LMS back on the air in 2018. The shows were seen as appealing to the same audience—the titular character of “Roseanne” had evolved into a Trump supporter since the 90s—and the comedy’s return had reaped massive ratings.
“Everyone took a good hard look at the success of “Roseanne,” Dana Walden, then CEO of Fox Television Group, explained at the time. “It reminded us we have a huge iconic star in our Fox family in Tim Allen.”
The move to Fox led to three more seasons of LMS, which the right celebrated as a win. Conservatives attributed the show’s resurrection to the backlash after ABC killed it, as much as to the “Roseanne” factor.
Season 7 premiered to blowout ratings, at least in this era, with over 8.3 million live viewers. The Fox debut had the second highest viewership of any LMS episode since Season 1.
LMS’ blockbuster return also indicated that the program had picked up new fans, people that weren’t watching it on ABC, but jumped on the bandwagon out of outrage when it was taken off the air. Supporting LMS and Allen had become a cause célèbre on the right and a proxy for supporting Trump and Republicans.
And now that Allen—and Trump—are back, the same dynamics seem to be at work. The “Shifting Gears” premiere debuted to 6.2 million live viewers and 17 million viewers over seven days, making it ABC’s most successful series launch since 2018 and its most streamed debut ever. Clearly, conservatives still see watching formulaic Tim Allen comedies as a form of tribal identification.
The “Shifting Gears” pilot was announced in March of last year, but the series wasn’t ordered by the network until the end of July. The timing could be coincidental, but it’s hard to believe that the order wasn’t at least somewhat influenced by Joe Biden’s debate debacle one month earlier and Trump’s assassination attempt survival two weeks before. It’s easy to imagine wavering executives looking at the political climate and concluding that, since there was a strong chance that they would soon be living under the rule of Trump, they had better provide a stage for his jester. So, seven years after ABC shoved Allen out, the network welcomed him back.
Allen’s welcome back to primetime has been very different from that of a fellow graying, iconic actor and comedian, Denis Leary. Leary also returned to television in January in his own father-daughter comedy, the wacky, military base-based “Going Dutch.” Leary’s show has struggled to get a million live viewers, has anemic streaming numbers and is rated “likely to be canceled” by The TV Ratings Guide website.
Yet “Going Dutch” has an 83% rating from critics on the site Rotten Tomatoes. “Shifting Gears” is at 47% [ed. note: having watched both shows, the critics are right].
Maybe Leary should announce that he supports Trump.
“Shifting Gears” airs Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. on ABC and is available for streaming on Hulu the next day.
Portions of this post have been inspired by my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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