Tim Allen returns to TV in ‘Shifting Gears’

Welcome Tim Allen back to the land of multicamera sitcom, for a third run 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 film star; “Last Man Standing,” which returned him to television after a decade in the movies, finished a nine-season run (six on ABC, three on Fox) in 2021. And here he is again, once more on ABC, with “Shifting Gears,” which premiered this week, which, if past is prelude, should just about see Allen — a fit 71, his tight T-shirt would like you to know — into his 80s.

Allen plays Matt, who — importing Allen’s own automotive interests — runs a garage specializing in vintage and custom cars. (Working here we find Daryl Mitchell as Stitch, a wise wisecracker, and Seann William Scott as Gabriel, handsome, amiable, a little dim.) Literally driving back into Matt’s life, in a filthy Pontiac GTO she stole from him 15 years before, when taking off pregnant with a musician boyfriend, is his daughter Riley (Kat Dennings). She’s getting divorced, musicians being what they are, and needs a place to land with her two kids, moody teenager Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and cheerful little Georgia (Barrett Margolis), who has a thing for inventor and “Shark Tank” panelist Lori Greiner and dreams of becoming a billionaire. (The kids are excellent.)

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

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

“You want to kill a spider, a man’s going to look pretty darn good.”

“I have a shoe.”

Father and daughter have been estranged, more or less — the kids do know their grandfather — since the death of Riley’s mother some indefinite 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, is trying to raise her kids with a sensitivity that Matt, who is all “in my day we were,” regards as coddling. And so they must learn to get along under the same roof. You get the picture.

When “Last Man Standing,” in which Allen played a not dissimilar character, went on the air in 2011, we were in the third year of the first Obama administration, and a show with a volubly conservative lead character played a little differently in the TV ecosystem; now, on the verge of heaven knows what, such a character reads as something like an adorable, almost moderate curmudgeon. Matt reads the Wall Street Journal and rails against television pundits “telling you what you’re supposed 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 hand basket,” Matt replies, “We don’t even make hand baskets in the U.S. anymore. We do make excuses, quitters and diabetes, and celebrities that use diabetes medicine to lose weight.” He describes Gabriel’s dirty hat as looking like “a normal hat that was left in Portland too long.”

The tenor of such softball japes can make “Shifting Gears” feel behind the times. There’s something sort of dutiful about the show’s sociopolitical humor, such as it is, which exists more to give the characters something to bat around than to say anything substantial about How We Ought to Live Now. And no one is batting very hard; this is, after all, a show about loving your difficult relations and putting differences aside. (Riley: “Can we try to talk to one another like rational adults? Matt: “Have you watched the news lately? That’s not a thing anymore.”) Classic stuff.

Allen and Dennings do 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 talking over one another, and very good not knowing exactly what to say. In one tender moment, side by side on a couch, unsure how to reach out, he touches her … foot. To the extent that there’s a new Tim Allen here, it’s the one who, thinking of his late wife, and the flour sifter he has taken care not to clean, he cries, almost, sort of. But there has always been a soft center to his self-important characters. (And who 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 though it’s sometimes Nancy Pelosi.”

“Yeah, 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 is perhaps why the second episode — only two were available to watch — feels less focused.

That there is nothing new to see here is not in the series’ disfavor. Political differences among close-quartered sitcom families go back at least as far as “All in the Family.” Formulas are formulas because they give consistent, reliable, unsurprising results.