‘Shifting Gears’ Can’t Shake Its Tim Allen-ness No Matter How Hard It Tries

There was a time, not very long ago, when conservative comedy was generally dismissed. Conceptually, commentators would say, it’s a contradiction in terms, in that the purpose of comedy is to challenge systems of powers that conservatives, definitionally, seek to preserve. In practice, they only have one joke, and it’s not funny. But in a political climate in which hard-right voices are dominant, ABC evidently doesn’t need to be known as the network that summarily fired Roseanne from her namesake sitcom for one racist tweet too many; now it’s the network getting back in the Tim Allen business after cancelling his last show in 2017, and despite his many backward views and unprofessional on-set behavior. His new multi-cam sitcom, Shifting Gears, is too witless to get mad about, but it’s striking how much effort and talent it wastes trying to counter-balance a 21st-century Tim Allen character.

Shifting Gears, which premieres January 8th, stars Allen as Matt Parker. Though the pilot cold open gives the impression that it’s going to be a workplace comedy set at the classic car restoration business Matt owns, and the staffers who work there — sweet simpleton Gabriel (Seann William Scott), sardonic Ed (Daryl Mitchell); queer Frankie (Cynthia Quiles) doesn’t get a line until Episode Two — soon a classic GTO screams in. Matt hasn’t seen this car since someone stole it from him 15 years ago, and moments later the culprit shows herself: It’s his estranged daughter Riley (Kat Dennings), and she’s returned to her hometown with her two children because she’s divorcing their father and has nowhere else to go. This is going to be hard on both Riley and Matt, because they’ve always had a tense relationship, and while Matt’s wife Diane used to be the bridge between father and daughter, she recently died. The show was co-created by husband-and-wife team Mike Scully and Julie Thacker Scully, whose most recent co-production was Fox’s animated series Duncanville; showrunner Michelle Nader has previously worked with Dennings on 2 Broke Girls and Dollface.

2 Broke Girls wasn’t for me, but it was obviously an excellent training ground for Dennings. As multi-cams die off, multi-cam acting skills are broadly going extinct, but Dennings is better than most actors exhibiting comic timing when a live audience is present affecting the flow of a scene. Riley isn’t a huge stretch from Max, her 2 Broke Girls character, but she does come to us with a lot of pathos. She originally left home and college because she’d become unexpectedly pregnant by Jimmy, an itinerant bass player. Now Riley has two children — and an online BA — but since Jimmy proved to be the wrong partner for her, she has no idea what she’s going to do for work for the rest of her life, other than that she doesn’t want to be a lawyer (possibly because that’s always been Matt’s dream for her). Navigating this transition while living with her judgmental father obviously provides a lot of opportunities for Riley and Matt to jokingly snipe at each other, but Dennings finds the truth in her character’s shame and fear. In short, she’s better than she needs to be. 

This is also true of Scott, who’s been reliable as a lovable idiot since Dude, Where’s My Car? and beyond. Gabriel was best friends with Riley’s as-yet-unseen brother when they were all in high school, and he didn’t approve of Jimmy either, so given the economy of sitcom characters, it seems likely that if the show lasts, Gabriel and Riley will end up in some kind of romance. Mitchell doesn’t get much to do in the first couple of episodes other than spar with Matt about the correct terminology he should use regarding Ed (who uses a wheelchair) and reparations for slavery (not that the term “slavery” comes up), but his comic chops and charm are as evident here as they were back when he was in the supporting cast of (confusingly) Ed, the NBC dramedy with Tom Cavanagh. I can’t comment on Quiles as Frankie, since she only appears in the background of the first episode and shows up just long enough in the second to establish that she sleeps with women. Perhaps later episodes will tell us why Frankie and Ed choose to work for Matt; since we do find out in the second episode that Gabriel thinks he’s underpaid, it seems unlikely that the Black man and Latinx woman are doing their jobs for the money. 

There are also the kids: a teen boy named Carter, played by Maxwell Simkins, and a pre-tween girl named Georgia, played by Barrett Margolis. They are neither so amateurish that they make the viewer feel uncomfortable, nor precocious enough to rankle, so when I say they’re both unremarkable, I actually mean it as a compliment.

Alas, any effort the supporting cast puts into creating three-dimensional characters is for naught when Matt is a living cartoon. After Ed and Gabriel note that Matt hasn’t gone off on his usual rant yet, Matt makes his entrance, coming out of his office to say he can hear them. Ed snorts, “Let me guess: the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.” “We don’t even make handbaskets in the U.S. anymore,” Matt sneers. “You know what we do make? Excuses, quitters and diabetes. And celebrities who use diabetes medicine to lose weight. You want to lose weight? It’s simple. This hole here (points at his mouth) bigger than this one back here (points at his butt).” Do I even need to add that he pronounces the disease “diabete-iss”? If so: he does.

I’m sure the Tim Allen fans who watched him headline Last Man Standing for nine seasons aren’t here to see him play someone pleasant or reasonable, but making his second and third lines of this whole show so aggressive is a pointed statement of intent: If you keep watching, you can’t pretend you didn’t know what you were going to get. Even when storylines dramatize how Matt’s ideas about the world are wrong and outdated — when he goads Carter into driving without a license, or when he harangues Riley out of letting Carter use academic accommodations for his anxiety — the show would have no premise if he hadn’t been right about Riley and Jimmy, a victory he keeps smugly holding over her head. And any credit he might fairly claim for taking in Riley and her children despite the friction between Riley and Matt is cancelled out by his frequent reminders of how dependent she now is on him, giving a nasty overtone to most of their interactions.

Basically, this is a show that lives down to your expectations for a Tim Allen sitcom in the post-Trump era. There are jokes about mocktails, pronouns, pickleball, lazy public employees, who’s allowed to use the word “dwarf,” hate-watching the news to form one’s own “angry opinions,” Nancy Pelosi and rideshares (“Jesus didn’t Uber: he takes the wheel”). This also means that if you don’t agree with Tim Allen’s views across the board, Shifting Gears has nothing to offer you. 

Enjoy reclaiming your time.