The Latest Jay Leno/Tim Allen Comedy Team-Up Might Break Boomer Internet
Tell your parents to crank up the VCR because the greatest comedy stars of 1993 are teaming up for an epic night of dad jokes. You heard that right — ‘90s Tonight Show host Jay Leno is joining ‘90s sitcom superstar Tim Allen on a new episode of Allen’s Shifting Gears.
Leno likely took the role to flex his acting muscles, playing Guy Who Owns a Car. Allen, in what sounds like the Jay Leno role, stars as a curmudgeonly widow who owns a classic car restoration shop. In the upcoming episode, Leno brings his car in for repairs. Hilarity, no doubt, ensues.
It might sound like I’m joking when I say the episode could break the Boomer Internet, that curious intersection where MapQuest meets Lycos, but Allen’s new comedy is more popular than you think. Premiering in January, Shifting Gears is the season’s highest-rated sitcom and it’s not particularly close. It’s at least a million viewers ahead of its nearest competition — Ghosts and George and Mandy’s First Marriage.
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For context, the buzzy Abbott Elementary/It’s Always Sunny crossover was watched by 4.57 million viewers. The Shifting Gears premiere more than doubled that number with 11.4 million people tuning in. Say what you want about ex-felon Allen — call him an ex-felon, for example — but a certain aging demographic loves to watch that dude on TV.
Now if Allen and Leno really want to blow the ratings through the roof, may I suggest they reenact their burn-out contest from an early ‘90s Tonight Show episode? After both stars bragged about how they’d “lay patches” in parking lots as teenage delinquents, they ventured to the NBC parking lot to see who could burn rubber the longest. Fifty feet? Sixty? Seventy? Real men don’t talk about it — they get behind the wheel and prove it.
Leno, in a souped-up sports car supposedly borrowed from his wife, easily won the battle — hey, it was his show, after all — but he lost the war when cops showed up and threw him in the pokey.
Given Leno’s current-day predilection for accidents and setting himself on fire, a rematch would be Must See TV, to use a term from their day. And since they would be on Allen’s turf this time, he’d have the upper hand as he sought sweet, sweet revenge.
That would be much more exciting than Allen’s appearances on Jay Leno’s Garage, where the guys did boring stuff like driving around in Allen’s rare English Ford RS200. The car love is a given — we want to see competition. We want to see oneupmanship. And in a perfect world, we want to see a fiery crash in which each comedian emerges with hilarious bumps and bruises.
