‘Shifting Gears’ review: Tim Allen returns along with his politics

On January 8, 2025By Littum

Welcome Tim Allen back to the land of the multi-camera sitcom, for a third innings in a form that has treated him well. “Home Improvement” ran for eight seasons on ABC and is arguably what allowed him to become a movie star; “Last Man Standing,” which brought him back to TV after a decade in the movies, ended a nine-season run (six on ABC, three on Fox) in 2021. And here he is again, back on ABC, with “Shifting Gears ,” premiering Wednesday, which, if the past is any guide, should almost see Allen — a fit 71, his tight T-shirt wants you to know — into his 80s.

Allen plays Matt, who – importing Allen’s own car interests – runs a workshop specializing in vintage and custom cars. (Working here, we find Daryl Mitchell as Stitch, a clever sewer man, and Seann William Scott as Gabriel, handsome, amiable, a little weak.) She literally drove back into Matt’s life in a dirty Pontiac GTO she stole from him 15 years before, when he left pregnant with a musician boyfriend, his daughter is Riley (Kat Dennings). She is getting divorced, musicians being what they are, and needs a place to land with her two children, moony teenager Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and cheerful little Georgia (Barrett Margolis) who has a thing for the inventor and “Shark Tank” panelist Lori Greiner and dreams of becoming a billionaire. (The children are excellent.)

“Well, good luck finding a man who’s okay with his wife making more money than him,” says Matt, an old-fashioned kind of guy.

“I don’t need a man to feel complete,” Georgia replies.

“You’ll kill a spider, a man is going to look pretty good.”

“I have a shoe.”

Father and daughter have been separated, more or less—the children know their grandfather—since the death of Riley’s mother some unspecified years before; she was the bridge that allowed them to have a relationship. Riley, a former wild child voted “Mean for No Reason” by her high school class, tries to raise her children with a sensibility that Matt, who is all “in my time, we were,” considers bullshit. And then they must learn to get along under the same roof. You get the picture.

A woman stands in the door of a dirty red car, while two children and two men look in her direction.

When “Last Man Standing,” in which Allen played a not unlike character, aired in 2011, we were in the third year of the first Obama administration, and a show with an outspoken conservative protagonist played a little differently in the TV ecosystem; now, bordering on heaven knows what, such a character can be read as something akin to an adorable, almost moderate curmudgeon. Matt reads the Wall Street Journal and rails against TV pundits who “tell you what to think about the news, like I’m too stupid to form my own angry opinion.” When Stitch, anticipating one of Matt’s rants, says, “Let me guess, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket,” Matt replies, “We don’t even make handbaskets in the US anymore. We make excuses, give up and diabetes, and celebrities using diabetes drugs to lose weight.” He describes Gabriel’s dirty hat as looking like “a normal hat that was left too long in Portland.”

The tenor of such softball japes can make “Shifting Gears” feel backward. There’s something kind of dutiful about the show’s sociopolitical humor as it is, which exists more to give the characters something to talk about than to say anything substantial about How We Should Live Now. And no one hits very hard; after all, this is a show about loving your difficult relationships and putting aside differences. (Riley: “Can we try talking to each other like rational adults? Matt: “Have you seen the news lately? It’s not a thing anymore.”) Classic stuff.

Allen and Dennings quickly strike a satisfying mix of antagonism and affection. Both know their way around a filmed-before-a-live-audience sitcom. (Dennings spent six seasons on “2 Broke Girls.”) They’re very good at talking over each other, and very good at not knowing exactly what to say. In a tender moment, side by side on a couch, unsure of how to reach out, he touches her … foot. To the extent that there’s a new Tim Allen here, it’s him who, when you think about his late wife and the mealy-mouth he’s made sure not to clean, he almost cries, sort of. But there has always been a soft center for his self-important characters. (And who really needs a new Tim Allen?)

“It’s been really different here, alone,” he tells Riley. “I think that’s why I watch the news in the morning, so I can hear a woman’s voice — even if sometimes it’s Nancy Pelosi.”

“Yes, it’s annoying the way she’s trying to save democracy.”

The series was created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker Scully, “Simpsons” writers and co-creators with Amy Poehler of the animated series “Duncanville.” They reportedly left after the pilot (directed by John Pasquin, who directed about a fifth of “Home Improvement” and more than a third of “Last Man Standing” episodes), which may be why the second episode – only two were available to see – feel less focused.

That there is nothing new to see here is not in the series’ disfavor. Political differences among close-knit sitcom families go back at least as far as “All in the Family,” which had been off the air for nearly a decade when the Dennings were born; grown kids moving in with parents or parents moving in with kids (see “Lopez vs Lopez,” currently in its third season on NBC) is an old theme on TV that loves to pack in so many generations in a three-wall set as possible. Formulas are formulas because they produce consistent, reliable, unsurprising results.