Last Updated on March 8, 2024
Comedian Tim Allen has a new sitcom pilot at ABC, marking a rare accomplishment in Hollywood for an outspoken conservative. Allen is the star of Shifting Gears, playing a classic car restoration shop owner who takes in his grown daughter and her kids. ABC ordered a pilot from 20th Television, which was previously a Fox studio but is now owned by Disney. If the pilot gets picked up as a series, Allen will be back on the network airwaves. Can Allen broadcast patriotic values on a Disney show?
Allen’s first hit sitcom Home Improvement, which cast him as Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, launched on ABC in 1991 and became a smash hit before Disney purchased ABC in 1995. Allen worked with Disney on the Santa Clause movies and the recent Santa Clauses series, which had a scene depicting kids holding signs saying “Love You Satan.” Allen also played Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies.
Allen’s own conservative sitcom Last Man Standing aired on ABC from 2011 to 2017 but got cancelled, prompting fan backlash in Middle America, which led Fox to pick up the show from 2018 to 2021. On Last Man Standing, Allen played an anti-Obama conservative executive of a sporting goods store.
Home Improvement was a smash hit back in the 1990’s, ranking in the Top Ten in the yearly Nielsen ratings for eight seasons in a row between 1991 and 1999.
Tim Allen has an interesting story. Allen got arrested in 1978 in Michigan and served more than two years of prison time for dealing cocaine, but then he turned his life around and became one of America’s most prominent family-friendly entertainers during a boom era for family entertainment in the 1990’s. Home Improvement also inspired the classic Internet meme depicting a neighbor who can never fully be seen peering over a fence to give advice to a protagonist, which was a running bit on the show.
“Once I realized the last president pissed people off, I kinda liked that,” Allen told podcaster Marc Maron, referring to President Donald Trump. Allen called himself a “fiscal conservative” who “just didn’t think that Hillary should’ve been president” and “Didn’t join in the lynching crowd” against Trump.
