Tim Allen is about to embark on a journey few have attempted: the sitcom triple crown. There are countless comedians with sitcoms, and of those there are some comedians with successful sitcoms. But how many can boast multiple successful sitcoms? As far as I can tell, Tim seeks to enter the rarefied atmosphere of a Bob Newhart with his new program Shifting Gears. Think about it: Bob Newhart had The Bob Newhart Show (142 episodes), then Newhart (184 episodes), then Bob (33 episodes). He had to use his birth first name for his final outing, a two hander with Judd Hirsch called George and Leo (22 episodes). Tim Allen has under his belt Home Improvement (204 episodes) and Last Man Standing (194 episodes). There are a couple of differences between the two men: as far as I know, Bob Newhart wasn’t a cocaine trafficking snitch, but feel free to correct me if that was the case. You could also argue his sitcoms were “good”, but that’s really in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure Last Man Standing has a phalanx of fans who are also concerned about who’s allowed into our high school restrooms. With Shifting Gears, it looks as though Tim Allen will be able to enter sacred ground (Sitcom Valhalla) otherwise afforded to the likes of Newhart and Ted Danson. Even Kelsey Grammer is barred entry because playing one character across three shows is nothing compared to Ted Danson shaking off the embarrassment that was Ink (22 episodes) and doing 52 The Good Places. 52 episodes of that and not a single joke that rose above a sensible chuckle. That takes skill.
So what is Shifting Gears? Home Improvement was My Three Sons with power tools; Last Man Standing was Home Improvement with daughters instead of sons. Shifting Gears follows in the latter’s footsteps by making Tim Allen a girldad to Kat Dennings (2 Broke Girls), returning home after her marriage to a guy Tim hates finally extinguishes. Tim himself is a recent widower; his wife bridged the estranged gap between father and daughter. From a strategy perspective this is brilliant—you match Tim with another sitcom veteran to help shoulder the comedic load. Dennings in particular is a shrewd choice. She’s 8 years off from the end of 2 Broke Girls and since then has appeared in Marvel Cinematic Universe projects and Dollface (Hulu, not a real TV show). She’s the equivalent of a ballplayer looking to rebound after a couple of down years, and what better way to do that than to sarcastically raise her eyebrows as Tim Allen goes on about fluoride in the water making everyone soft.
The King is back, long live the King
A lot of people think Kat Dennings can “do better” than a Tim Allen sitcom, to which I say “have you seen 2 Broke Girls?”. Tim Allen would have to wear the Die Hard 3 sandwich board every episode to be as racist as that show. What you should be thinking is how Kat Dennings as a mother of two makes you feel old, which you are. The kid who played Young Sheldon? He’s a grandfather now. Tim runs an auto shop, hence the series title, that employs Daryl “Chill” Mitchell (Galaxy Quest) and Seann William Scott as Stitch and Gabriel, respectively. Yes, the black guy is named after the rambunctious blue alien, and given 20th Television is owned by Disney I cannot rule out that this is not some ill-advised viral marketing for the Lilo & Stitch live action movie. The cast is rounded out by Kat Dennings’ teenage son Carter and younger daughter Georgia. The former is “kids these days” fodder whereas the latter speaks precocious truths (“I don’t need a man to feel complete”).
The show, to its credit (?), seems aware of Tim Allen’s reputation as a Republican crank, because the characters treat him as a Republican crank (he has a Ronald Reagan gnome!) who is always 15 seconds away from going off on a rant on various topics, from Pluto’s planet status to people using diabetes medication to lose weight. There are multiple jokes about him losing his voice from ranting at the television too much. It’s called representation, folks: every year there are more and more grandparents sucked into paroxysms of rage based on Newsmax confirming their prejudices. We may not like it, but a sizable portion of the older population thinks Haitian immigrants eat cats and dogs and kids are switching genders to gain a competitive advantage in high school volleyball. If television is to reflect our society, then we need to acknowledge that. If you didn’t want Tim Allen to have a sitcom maybe you should’ve voted for Kamala Harris harder.
They’re SHIFTING GEARS of their father/daughter relationship by cohabitating. It’s clever.
The pilot’s plot concerns Carter not knowing how to drive and Tim finding it ridiculous he Ubers everywhere. It’s in this plot that Tim performs a Republican crank rite of passage—the driver’s seat cell phone video rant. Sure, he had those rants in Last Man Standing, but those were recorded in the safety of his home or office. To be a true unhinged grampy with a near non-existent relationship with their child you gotta do it in the driver’s seat. Preferably in a truck while wearing sunglasses, but there’s wiggle room. Carter inevitably crashes the car because he’s an idiot and Tim learns a valuable lesson: sometimes kids are just turds. Carter is a turd and teaching him self-sufficiency is pointless.
The next half-hour is about Carter’s high school’s open house. Instead of Kat Dennings attending alone, Tim Allen joins her. There Tim is exposed to a panoply of things designed to piss him off, such as the homeroom teacher announcing her pronouns are she/her. He protests to Kat: “I got no problem with people with different pronouns, I hate everyone equally”. I chalk this equivocation to the confines of network television. It’s reasonable to believe that Shifting Gears is trying to make Tim as right-wing as possible without alienating people. You’d best view his character as the furthest right a network sitcom can get in this media environment. So he can speak dismissively of Nancy Pelosi but can’t claim she’s harvesting adrenochrome and oppressing the mole people. He can rail against anxiety diagnoses but not claim Big Pharma is trying to sterilize the population with dangerous untested vaccines. To some this is a cop out, a means of manufacturing consent or “sanewashing” dangerous views. Me? I also consider it a cop out. Give us unvarnished Tim Allen. We can take it!
I know what you’re thinking and no, he’s NOT about to say the N-word.
Desperate to prove Carter doesn’t need special accommodations, Tim helps the dullard on his own and finds, again, that his grandson sucks. When Tim says the Allies won WWII, Carter responds “spoiler alert!”. That kind of dumb, and that kind of unfunny. So Tim devises a “cheat sheet” for him to use, which the school discovers, naturally. Lesson learned: Carter needs extra time to take tests because he’s an idiot. Tim’s moved to tears when the kid color codes his folders for all his classes. I don’t wanna tell these people how to do their job but this could’ve been the opportunity for a joke about how he hasn’t cried since, oh, Benghazi. Kat reunites with an old classmate who’s now the assistant principal. She then invites Seann William Scott along for drinks and proceeds to make a drunken embarrassment out of herself, thanks to projected self-loathing. This plot doesn’t really come to anything and suggests the show has more ideas for Tim Allen than it does for Kat Dennings. It makes sense: to craft a Tim storyline you just need a cultural trend from the last 30 years for him to bounce off of, whereas Kat Dennings requires slightly more nuance.
Multiple characters assume Tim and Kat are husband and wife. It’s weird.
It’s not all laughs with this show. I appreciated the moments in which Shifting Gears expected us to derive emotion from these flat characters and performances, because it’s kind of adorable. I’m not gonna give a shit about their dead mother/wife Diane. There’s another moment where Tim reassures Kat that she’s a good mom and nary a joke to be found. That’s not what I’m here for; it’s like that drawing of My Little Pony at Auschwitz. If it’s scaffolding required to build the central relationship that the show relies on, then that’s fine. Just don’t overdo it, because the second the dead studio audience elicits an “awwwww” I’m changing my DVR settings.
Shifting Gears was created by husband and wife team Mike Scully and Julie Thacker, who you may remember from The Simpsons and The Pitts. Whatever you think of them (I like their writing), it doesn’t really matter because they left after the pilot. The most Simpsons vibes I got from the pilot was a scene of Tim not understanding the meaning of the word “meh”, a word The Simpsons famously popularized. Michelle Nader, showrunner for Kat Dennings’ Dollface and writer of 22 episodes of 2 Broke Girls takes over with episode 2. Instead of viewing this as Tim Allenism with Kat Dennings characteristics, it may be better to view Shifting Gears as Kat Denningsism with Tim Allen characteristics. The 80 year old show director John Pasquin is, however, a Tim Allen ringer, with the CV of The Santa Clause, Jungle 2 Jungle, Joe Somebody, 39 Home Improvements and 73 Last Man Standings to shore up his Tim bonafides. Imagine being 80 years old and still having to tell Tim Allen where his mark is. I would beg for the sweet release of death.
I want to highlight this character Frankie because she shows up solely to be a gay joke. It’s not at her expense, but she’s still a one joke character.
If there’s one thing lacking in Shifting Gears, and it applies to Last Man Standing as well, it’s grunts. Grunts are the foundation upon which the Tim Allen stand-up and the Toolman persona are built, and without them you’re forced to just listen to his half-formed opinions on current events and retrograde views of masculinity. Maybe it’s a rights issue, that the grunting is tied to the intellectual property Home Improvement. It would explain why he went from having half of his dialogue be unintelligible mouth sounds to those being entirely absent in his second and third sitcoms. Of course, Tim Allen did say “do not become addicted to grunts, for you will resent their absence”. His stylized “oh no” does not constitute a grunt necessarily but I will accept it if that’s what’s on offer.
I guess you want to know if the show is funny or not. Well, I think that’s missing the point. Sitcoms, multicamera sitcoms in 2025, are not about the laughs per se. They’re about familiarity, like a good pair of jeans. Comfort. This is the kind of show where the dead studio audience applauds upon the arrival of Tim Allen and applauds at the arrival of Kat Dennings. Laughs are not of utmost concern, in no small part due to the advanced age of the audience. A funny enough joke can send grampy and granny into an early grave. I commend Shifting Gears for never endangering the audience’s lives with good jokes.
The premiere of Shifting Gears netted ABC 6.1 million viewers (finally, a 6 million number Tim Allen won’t dispute), so it appears as though the Allen/Dennings juggernaut is upon us. Where does, then, Tim Allen fit on the Mount Rushmore of sitcoms? Is he on the Mount Rushmore of sitcoms? In my unbiased opinion, yes. Three successful sitcoms, over 400 episodes of entertainment, I say his bonafides speak for themselves. My choices for Sitcom Mount Rushmore: Bob Newhart, Lucille Ball, Chandler Bing (not Matthew Perry), Tim Allen. Now that would be a monument worth desecrating Native American property for.
Timspotting: Shifting Gears
Tim Allen is about to embark on a journey few have attempted: the sitcom triple crown. There are countless comedians with sitcoms, and of those there are some comedians with successful sitcoms. But how many can boast multiple successful sitcoms? As far as I can tell, Tim seeks to enter the rarefied atmosphere of a Bob Newhart with his new program Shifting Gears. Think about it: Bob Newhart had The Bob Newhart Show (142 episodes), then Newhart (184 episodes), then Bob (33 episodes). He had to use his birth first name for his final outing, a two hander with Judd Hirsch called George and Leo (22 episodes). Tim Allen has under his belt Home Improvement (204 episodes) and Last Man Standing (194 episodes). There are a couple of differences between the two men: as far as I know, Bob Newhart wasn’t a cocaine trafficking snitch, but feel free to correct me if that was the case. You could also argue his sitcoms were “good”, but that’s really in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure Last Man Standing has a phalanx of fans who are also concerned about who’s allowed into our high school restrooms. With Shifting Gears, it looks as though Tim Allen will be able to enter sacred ground (Sitcom Valhalla) otherwise afforded to the likes of Newhart and Ted Danson. Even Kelsey Grammer is barred entry because playing one character across three shows is nothing compared to Ted Danson shaking off the embarrassment that was Ink (22 episodes) and doing 52 The Good Places. 52 episodes of that and not a single joke that rose above a sensible chuckle. That takes skill.
So what is Shifting Gears? Home Improvement was My Three Sons with power tools; Last Man Standing was Home Improvement with daughters instead of sons. Shifting Gears follows in the latter’s footsteps by making Tim Allen a girldad to Kat Dennings (2 Broke Girls), returning home after her marriage to a guy Tim hates finally extinguishes. Tim himself is a recent widower; his wife bridged the estranged gap between father and daughter. From a strategy perspective this is brilliant—you match Tim with another sitcom veteran to help shoulder the comedic load. Dennings in particular is a shrewd choice. She’s 8 years off from the end of 2 Broke Girls and since then has appeared in Marvel Cinematic Universe projects and Dollface (Hulu, not a real TV show). She’s the equivalent of a ballplayer looking to rebound after a couple of down years, and what better way to do that than to sarcastically raise her eyebrows as Tim Allen goes on about fluoride in the water making everyone soft.
The King is back, long live the King
A lot of people think Kat Dennings can “do better” than a Tim Allen sitcom, to which I say “have you seen 2 Broke Girls?”. Tim Allen would have to wear the Die Hard 3 sandwich board every episode to be as racist as that show. What you should be thinking is how Kat Dennings as a mother of two makes you feel old, which you are. The kid who played Young Sheldon? He’s a grandfather now. Tim runs an auto shop, hence the series title, that employs Daryl “Chill” Mitchell (Galaxy Quest) and Seann William Scott as Stitch and Gabriel, respectively. Yes, the black guy is named after the rambunctious blue alien, and given 20th Television is owned by Disney I cannot rule out that this is not some ill-advised viral marketing for the Lilo & Stitch live action movie. The cast is rounded out by Kat Dennings’ teenage son Carter and younger daughter Georgia. The former is “kids these days” fodder whereas the latter speaks precocious truths (“I don’t need a man to feel complete”).
The show, to its credit (?), seems aware of Tim Allen’s reputation as a Republican crank, because the characters treat him as a Republican crank (he has a Ronald Reagan gnome!) who is always 15 seconds away from going off on a rant on various topics, from Pluto’s planet status to people using diabetes medication to lose weight. There are multiple jokes about him losing his voice from ranting at the television too much. It’s called representation, folks: every year there are more and more grandparents sucked into paroxysms of rage based on Newsmax confirming their prejudices. We may not like it, but a sizable portion of the older population thinks Haitian immigrants eat cats and dogs and kids are switching genders to gain a competitive advantage in high school volleyball. If television is to reflect our society, then we need to acknowledge that. If you didn’t want Tim Allen to have a sitcom maybe you should’ve voted for Kamala Harris harder.
They’re SHIFTING GEARS of their father/daughter relationship by cohabitating. It’s clever.
The pilot’s plot concerns Carter not knowing how to drive and Tim finding it ridiculous he Ubers everywhere. It’s in this plot that Tim performs a Republican crank rite of passage—the driver’s seat cell phone video rant. Sure, he had those rants in Last Man Standing, but those were recorded in the safety of his home or office. To be a true unhinged grampy with a near non-existent relationship with their child you gotta do it in the driver’s seat. Preferably in a truck while wearing sunglasses, but there’s wiggle room. Carter inevitably crashes the car because he’s an idiot and Tim learns a valuable lesson: sometimes kids are just turds. Carter is a turd and teaching him self-sufficiency is pointless.
The next half-hour is about Carter’s high school’s open house. Instead of Kat Dennings attending alone, Tim Allen joins her. There Tim is exposed to a panoply of things designed to piss him off, such as the homeroom teacher announcing her pronouns are she/her. He protests to Kat: “I got no problem with people with different pronouns, I hate everyone equally”. I chalk this equivocation to the confines of network television. It’s reasonable to believe that Shifting Gears is trying to make Tim as right-wing as possible without alienating people. You’d best view his character as the furthest right a network sitcom can get in this media environment. So he can speak dismissively of Nancy Pelosi but can’t claim she’s harvesting adrenochrome and oppressing the mole people. He can rail against anxiety diagnoses but not claim Big Pharma is trying to sterilize the population with dangerous untested vaccines. To some this is a cop out, a means of manufacturing consent or “sanewashing” dangerous views. Me? I also consider it a cop out. Give us unvarnished Tim Allen. We can take it!
I know what you’re thinking and no, he’s NOT about to say the N-word.
Desperate to prove Carter doesn’t need special accommodations, Tim helps the dullard on his own and finds, again, that his grandson sucks. When Tim says the Allies won WWII, Carter responds “spoiler alert!”. That kind of dumb, and that kind of unfunny. So Tim devises a “cheat sheet” for him to use, which the school discovers, naturally. Lesson learned: Carter needs extra time to take tests because he’s an idiot. Tim’s moved to tears when the kid color codes his folders for all his classes. I don’t wanna tell these people how to do their job but this could’ve been the opportunity for a joke about how he hasn’t cried since, oh, Benghazi. Kat reunites with an old classmate who’s now the assistant principal. She then invites Seann William Scott along for drinks and proceeds to make a drunken embarrassment out of herself, thanks to projected self-loathing. This plot doesn’t really come to anything and suggests the show has more ideas for Tim Allen than it does for Kat Dennings. It makes sense: to craft a Tim storyline you just need a cultural trend from the last 30 years for him to bounce off of, whereas Kat Dennings requires slightly more nuance.
Multiple characters assume Tim and Kat are husband and wife. It’s weird.
It’s not all laughs with this show. I appreciated the moments in which Shifting Gears expected us to derive emotion from these flat characters and performances, because it’s kind of adorable. I’m not gonna give a shit about their dead mother/wife Diane. There’s another moment where Tim reassures Kat that she’s a good mom and nary a joke to be found. That’s not what I’m here for; it’s like that drawing of My Little Pony at Auschwitz. If it’s scaffolding required to build the central relationship that the show relies on, then that’s fine. Just don’t overdo it, because the second the dead studio audience elicits an “awwwww” I’m changing my DVR settings.
Shifting Gears was created by husband and wife team Mike Scully and Julie Thacker, who you may remember from The Simpsons and The Pitts. Whatever you think of them (I like their writing), it doesn’t really matter because they left after the pilot. The most Simpsons vibes I got from the pilot was a scene of Tim not understanding the meaning of the word “meh”, a word The Simpsons famously popularized. Michelle Nader, showrunner for Kat Dennings’ Dollface and writer of 22 episodes of 2 Broke Girls takes over with episode 2. Instead of viewing this as Tim Allenism with Kat Dennings characteristics, it may be better to view Shifting Gears as Kat Denningsism with Tim Allen characteristics. The 80 year old show director John Pasquin is, however, a Tim Allen ringer, with the CV of The Santa Clause, Jungle 2 Jungle, Joe Somebody, 39 Home Improvements and 73 Last Man Standings to shore up his Tim bonafides. Imagine being 80 years old and still having to tell Tim Allen where his mark is. I would beg for the sweet release of death.
I want to highlight this character Frankie because she shows up solely to be a gay joke. It’s not at her expense, but she’s still a one joke character.
If there’s one thing lacking in Shifting Gears, and it applies to Last Man Standing as well, it’s grunts. Grunts are the foundation upon which the Tim Allen stand-up and the Toolman persona are built, and without them you’re forced to just listen to his half-formed opinions on current events and retrograde views of masculinity. Maybe it’s a rights issue, that the grunting is tied to the intellectual property Home Improvement. It would explain why he went from having half of his dialogue be unintelligible mouth sounds to those being entirely absent in his second and third sitcoms. Of course, Tim Allen did say “do not become addicted to grunts, for you will resent their absence”. His stylized “oh no” does not constitute a grunt necessarily but I will accept it if that’s what’s on offer.
I guess you want to know if the show is funny or not. Well, I think that’s missing the point. Sitcoms, multicamera sitcoms in 2025, are not about the laughs per se. They’re about familiarity, like a good pair of jeans. Comfort. This is the kind of show where the dead studio audience applauds upon the arrival of Tim Allen and applauds at the arrival of Kat Dennings. Laughs are not of utmost concern, in no small part due to the advanced age of the audience. A funny enough joke can send grampy and granny into an early grave. I commend Shifting Gears for never endangering the audience’s lives with good jokes.
The premiere of Shifting Gears netted ABC 6.1 million viewers (finally, a 6 million number Tim Allen won’t dispute), so it appears as though the Allen/Dennings juggernaut is upon us. Where does, then, Tim Allen fit on the Mount Rushmore of sitcoms? Is he on the Mount Rushmore of sitcoms? In my unbiased opinion, yes. Three successful sitcoms, over 400 episodes of entertainment, I say his bonafides speak for themselves. My choices for Sitcom Mount Rushmore: Bob Newhart, Lucille Ball, Chandler Bing (not Matthew Perry), Tim Allen. Now that would be a monument worth desecrating Native American property for.
Ronnie Gardocki