I\u2019ve been watching Tim Allen\u2019s Last Man Standing since its beginning.\u00a0 I\u2019ve enjoyed the show all along although the last two seasons\u2019 scripts were definitely at a lower level.\u00a0 Maybe they knew the series had almost run its course and the old writers had started to move on.\u00a0 But what was noticeable was a less skillful plot and dialog.\u00a0 And for all the angst from the left about its right wing slant the point of view was a mild libertarian stance with a few humorous jibes thrown at Obama or Hillary Clinton by Tim\u2019s character (Mike Baxter).\u00a0 And just to make sure no one thought there was an ideological problem the wife played by Nancy Travis is a Hillary fan and a fairly mild feminist.\u00a0 My biggest disappointment was in the final season that only one small joke about Trump showed up in the show.\u00a0 That\u2019s how timid they were.\u00a0 But all that aside, the show was refreshing because Mike was at least allowed to mostly correspond to a normal man of his generation.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t forced to make believe he didn\u2019t like sports and cars and guns and hunting and fishing.\u00a0 He was pro-military and traditional in his ideas about gender roles and religion and unabashedly American.\u00a0 He spends a considerable time on the screen mocking his Canadian soy-boy son-in-law (Ryan) but at the same time he mentors this young man on family responsibilities for a husband and a father.<\/p>\n
In 2017 Disney\/ABC was in a snit about Trump being president so they cancelled Last Man Standing, even though it was the most popular show on Friday nights and doing well financially.\u00a0 Tim Allen who has been a staple of ABC and Disney for decades said he was devastated that they pulled the plug on him so needlessly.\u00a0 Next season (2018), when Roseanne Barr’s\u00a0 reboot of her show Roseanne featured a star that had some positive things to say about Trump and did land office business it immediately woke up some network geniuses to the fact that Last Man Standing was ready made to take advantage of that same audience.\u00a0 And when Roseanne’s show was cancelled because she said something politically incorrect about an Obama administration official, well, that same audience was now available for another show that had characters they could relate to.<\/p>\n
Because 20th Century Fox was the production company that originally made Last Man Standing for ABC it wasn\u2019t much of a stretch for the Fox Network to consider bringing back the show and hosting it on their network.\u00a0 And that\u2019s just what they\u2019ve done.\u00a0 Boy, this has been some wind up for a tv review!<\/p>\n
Camera Girl and I watched the show on Friday night.\u00a0 It was pretty good.\u00a0 They started off with a set up where the Kyle character (one of the sons-in-law) is failing to find his favorite show on tv and his in-laws throw out some lines about networks being bastards for cancelling good shows and how it very rarely happens that a show is picked up by another network unless its fans are truly great.\u00a0 So, light fun, and here we go.<\/p>\n
The show revolves around the family being split between conservatives and liberals quarreling about the Trump presidency.\u00a0 But the writers decide to completely leave out Trump\u2019s name.\u00a0 Now that felt phony.\u00a0 Next the Canadian son-in-law Ryan gets so stressed about living in Trump\u2019s America without any way to address his opposition to it that he decides he\u2019s moving his family to Canada.\u00a0 When Ryan\u2019s young son goes missing the family rallies around to find him.\u00a0 They forget all their quarrels and after finding him safe they use the happy outcome to cement their solidarity and agree to look for common ground.\u00a0 As is usual with the show, Mike ends the episode with a vlog from his office at Outdoorsman to talk about the importance of Americans finding common ground and there being two points of view, left and right.\u00a0 He does takes one small jab by saying that \u201cof course one of them already has the word \u201cright\u201d already in it.<\/p>\n
So, there it is.\u00a0 The show is back.\u00a0 And it is a nice middle of the road show that stakes out a spot for a character that is an American man who hasn\u2019t been neutered and feminized.\u00a0 Is it a full-throated roar of defiance by the right wing?\u00a0 Hardly.\u00a0 Will it even acknowledge by name the Trump revolution?\u00a0 Hopefully.\u00a0 But so far, the verdict is still out.\u00a0 Is it funnier than last season?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 My plan is to watch a few more episodes and then evaluate whether I\u2019m still going to be standing with Tim Allen\u2019s last man.\u00a0 Did you see what I did there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been watching Tim Allen\u2019s Last Man Standing since its beginning.\u00a0 I\u2019ve enjoyed the show all along although the last two seasons\u2019 scripts were definitely<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,237,6,240],"tags":[901,1358,907],"class_list":["post-4417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-trump","category-tv-reviews","tag-last-man-standing","tag-television-review","tag-tim-allen"],"yoast_head":"\n