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.
Yes, eight years after the network canceled his last sitcom of the same genre, “Last Man Standing” (later picked up by Fox, where it ran until 2021), Allen is back on ABC. And now, instead of playing an overwrought patriarch working at an outdoorsy company battling with a wife and daughters, he’s an overwrought patriarch who owns a classic car shop and battles one daughter, played by Kat Dennings. So different!
“Gears” (Wednesdays, 8 EST/PST, ★½ out of four), created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker-Scully (“The Simpsons”), is neither original nor exciting; It’s an unchallenging and not very funny package of generational stereotypes and grating banter between Allen and Dennings. The two episodes made available for review feature dialogue so bland it could have been written by AI. They lack excitement in any way, but are not so achingly terrible they offend the senses. And considering both Allen’s track record and the recent spate of deeply disappointing multi-camera sitcoms on broadcast TV, that’s actually an achievement. Expectations are everything.
This series finds Allen as Matt, a widower, everyman and possessor of Fox News opinions. His quiet life is turned upside down (a sitcom must) when his daughter Riley (Dennings) moves back home with her two kids amid an expensive divorce. Now he has to deal with these soft kids who would rather Uber than drive and his rebellious, free-thinking daughter, all while running his shop, manned by his unserious mechanics Stitch (Daryl “Chill” Mitchell) and Gabriel (Seann William Scott). How much can one man handle?
It’s all very predictable, designed for lowest common denominator humor and confirmation bias. The kids (Barrett Margolis and Maxwell Simkins) act like “kids these days” with their screens and their made-up anxiety. Dennings’ Riley sounds like a teenager despite being in her 30s. Matt may be wrong about some things, but he always retains the moral high ground. This isn’t a man who is ready to learn anything new. And the series even manages to make the joke (more than once!) that Riley and Matt are mistaken for a couple. You’ll shiver with disgust.
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Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad “Gears” is, because it’s a Tim Allen show. 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.
It hasn’t driven off a cliff. Yet.
