#Tim allen last man standing series#

citizen so he can vote to cancel out Tim Allen’s vote. The two political sides of the family snap at each other and call each other names, but ultimately decide that family is more important than politics, and the guy who was going to move to Canada decides, instead, to become a U.S. There is some speechifying disguised as jokes about how we should all just learn to get along that we’re all family that we should stop unfriending each other and that the broken country is still worth fixing (using a broken-down motorcycle as a metaphor). There’s a strawman - the son-in-law - who is a stand-in for the liberals, a Canadian who freaks out because of the direction of the country and threatens to take his family and move to Canada. The entire open of the episode was a big meta-joke about a show that Tim Allen’s family is watching being canceled, but moved to another channel in the same slot because of the fans, after which the show takes up politics. It’s a bland laugh-track sitcom, and even this episode - which was entirely political - didn’t merit getting worked up over. Of course, after Last Man Standing put up 10 million viewers, I had to see what the fuss was all about, and so I watched an episode for the first time, and here’s what I’ll say about the sitcom based on my one-episode sampling: It’s nothing. It even drew a solid 1.8 in the 18-49 demo.ĪBC inadvertently martyred Tim Allen, and now Fox is reaping all the benefits of that. On Friday night, Last Man Standing returned with 10 million viewers, the best ratings for any comedy on television last week besides Big Bang Theory. In some ways, Last Man Standing pulled a Trump: Tim Allen took an innocuous business decision, turned it into something political, and stoked the base, so to speak.

Tim Allen framed the cancellation as politically motivated, conservative media picked up on it, conservative social media rallied around it, and Fox - which had canceled Brooklyn Nine-Nine - opted to take a chance on Last Man Standing and gave the show its old time slot on a different network.

I seriously doubt that the network that aired the Roseanne revival had anything against the series’ conservative agenda).

#Tim allen last man standing series#

It just kind of existed over there on the sidelines away from my view, and it somehow managed to run for six seasons, creating only a blip of conversation at the end of every season when ABC left its future uncertain and Tim Allen started railing about liberal bias.īut in the Trump era, we pick sides, don’t we? And when ABC canceled Last Man Standing, that was seen as a shot against conservatives, even though it was my understanding that the cancellation had nothing to do with ratings and everything to do with costs (20th Century Fox paid for the production of the series for the first six seasons, but after that contract ended, ABC opted against picking up the production costs on the seventh season. His show, Last Man Standing, aired on Friday nights to modest ratings (usually in the 6 million viewer range), but the series presumably never said anything worthwhile enough to merit discussion. For the last six years, I have been comfortable with very little knowledge of Tim Allen’s existence.