These Are the Most Brutal Reviews of Tim Allen’s New Boomer Humor Sitcom

On Tim Allen’s newest TV show Shifting Gears, the TV giant larps as a blue-collar man’s man who owns the libs and learns some lessons about family in what critics have described as “a comedy.”

“Headstrong widower Matt owns a classic-car workshop,” reads the IMDb synopsis of the ABC show. “When his separated daughter and her teenage children arrive at his house, the real restoration begins.” 

Created by Mike and Julie Thacker Scully, the former of whom is best known for show-running The Simpsons through its infamous “Jerkass Homer” era, Shifting Gears is the second broadcast sitcom featuring an older stand-up playing a conservative father who butts heads with his estranged liberal daughter to premiere this month, following Fox and Denis Leary’s Going Dutch.

Like all conservative comedy projects, Shifting Gears trots out the same 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” that everyone’s ornery uncle keeps in the tank for family gatherings, and the Allen vehicle is currently spinning its wheels at an unamused 38 percent on RottenTomatoes following last night’s premiere.

Despite the well-received performances of Shifting Gears supporting cast members Kat Dennings and Sean William Scott, as The Daily Beast's Jesse Hassenger puts it, “Tim Allen’s New Cranky Boomer Sitcom Is His Worst Yet.”

In his review, Hassenger notes that, as the latest of many old-man sitcoms to mine the political and cultural divides between generations for “humor,” Shifting Gears' approach to poking fun at our fractured society is to “pay repeated and tedious lip service to cultural divides via canned rants and musty ripostes, uniting everyone in the purgatorial state of soundstage banter.” Comparing Shifting Gears unfavorably to the previous Allen sitcoms like Home Improvement and Last Man Standing on which the comic played the exact same character, Hassenger wondered, “Maybe Allen just revels in playing the cantankerous truth-teller, enjoying the delusion that he’s a modern-day Archie Bunker (or the misconception that Archie Bunker was an aspirational figure).”

“Shifting Gears obviously doesn’t intend to push buttons,” Hassenger says of the sitcom’s political angle. “Or, rather, it intends to mash at buttons indiscriminately, in hopes that the sounds they make — Nancy Pelosi! Breakdown of civility! Throwing shade? — will resemble jokes.” The critic added of the Scullys’ part in Shifting Gears, “This is a soul-crushing development from Mike Scully, who co-created the show with wife Julie Thacker Scully. They’ve both written multiple episodes of The Simpsons, an institution that Scully also ran for a time. His four seasons as executive producer were uneven by that show’s standards, but they’re masterworks compared to anything that happens during the two Shifting Gears episodes that ABC provided for review.”

In Daniel Fienberg’s Shifting Gears review for The Hollywood Reporter, he bemoaned the show’s crushing similarities not just to every other Allen project, but to the aforementioned Going Dutch, which he says somehow pulled off the shared conceit more effectively. “The strange truth is that I watched Shifting Gears wishing for more moments at which my soul died, because that’s at least a thing, a feeling, a reaction generated by the show and the voice of the show," Fienberg wrote bleakly. “I watched Shifting Gears thinking that it was Last Man Standing without the guts to come right out and just be Last Man Standing.”

However, the critical response to Shifting Gears was in no way unilateral disappointment. Kelly Lawler of USA Today wrote of her pleasant surprise while watching the sitcom, “The best thing I can say about Shifting Gears, ABC’s new Tim Allen-rants-about-woke-stuff-he-hates sitcom, is that I thought it would be a lot worse than it is.” And, while the show is “neither original nor exciting,” a “not very funny package of generational stereotypes” and it “features dialogue so bland it could have been written by A.I.,” Lawler raved that the episodes she watched were “not so achingly terrible they offend the senses.”

“It doesn’t really matter how good or bad Gears is, because it’s a Tim Allen show,” Lawler summarized. “There are two camps of people: Those who like Allen and will follow him to any series that can string two sentences together; and those to whom he is an intense turnoff, and won’t bother sampling Gears even if it was an Emmy-winning triumph. I have to admit Allen is not my particular cup of tea, but some doses of the actor are fine, while others can be downright toxic. A Santa Clause TV show? Impossible to sit through. A middling sitcom? Sort of palatable.”

Lawler optimistically concluded of Shifting Gears, “It hasn’t driven off a cliff. Yet.”