Tim Allen sitcom just for his fans

On By Littum

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The best I can say about “Shift gears,” ABC is new Tim Allen-whispers-about-woke-things-he-hates sitcom is that I thought it would be a lot worse than it is.

Yes, eight years after the network canceled his last sitcom of the same genre, “Last Man Standing” (later picked up by Fox, where it ran until 2021), Allen is back at ABC. And now, instead of playing an over-the-top patriarch working at an outdoor company struggling with a wife and daughters, he’s an over-the-top patriarch who owns a classic car dealership and struggles with a daughter played by Kat Dennings. So different!

“Gears” (Wednesdays, 8 EST/PST, ★½ of four), created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker-Scully (“The Simpsons”), is neither original nor exciting; It’s an unchallenging and not very funny package of generational stereotypes and grating banter between Allen and Dennings. The two episodes made available for review contain dialogue so bland it could have been written by AI. They lack excitement in any way, but are not so painfully awful as to offend the senses. And given both Allen’s track record and the recent spate of deeply disappointing multi-camera sitcoms on broadcast television, that’s quite an achievement indeed. Expectations are everything.

This series finds Allen as Matt, a widower, handyman and possessor of Fox News opinions. His quiet life is turned upside down (a sitcom must) when his daughter Riley (Dennings) moves home with her two children in the middle of an expensive divorce. Now he has to deal with these soft-spoken kids who would rather Uber than drive and his rebellious, free-thinking daughter, all while running his shop, staffed by his rogue mechanics Stitch (Daryl “Chill” Mitchell) and Gabriel (Seann William Scott ). How much can one man handle?

It’s all very predictable, designed for lowest common denominator humor and confirmation bias. The kids (Barrett Margolis and Maxwell Simkins) act like “kids these days” with their screens and their made-up anxiety. Dennings’ Riley sounds like a teenager despite being in her 30s. Matt may be wrong about some things, but he always maintains the moral high ground. This is not a man who is ready to learn something new. And the series even manages to make the joke (more than once!) that Riley and Matt are mistaken for a couple. You will shudder in disgust.

At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t matter how good or bad “Gears” is, because it’s a Tim Allen show. There are two camps of people: Those who like Allen and will follow him to any series that can put two sentences together; and those for whom he is an intense turnoff and won’t bother to sample “Gears” even though it was an Emmy-winning triumph. I have to admit that Allen is not my particular cup of tea, but some doses of the actor are fine, while others can be downright toxic. A “Santa Claus” TV show? Impossible to sit through. A mediocre sitcom? Kind of tasty.

It has not been driven off a cliff. Yet.