Sitcom staple Tim Allen returned to ABC with his newest comedy Shifting Gears hitting the 2025 TV schedule, where his car-restoring widow is tasked to find common ground with his estranged daughter and the grandchildren he barely knows. It’s quite a change from the family life his character Mike Baxter enjoyed on Last Man Standing, with Nancy Travis as Vanessa, wife and mother of their three opposite-of-estranged daughters. And Allen apparently took his TV fatherdom quite seriously at times.
As the stand-up comedian himself put it, he sometimes spoke (and maybe still speaks) of his younger Last Man Standing co-stars — Kaitlyn Dever, Molly Ephraim and Amanda Fuller — as if they were legitimately part of his immediately family at some point. When talking to US Weekly about his continued relationship with his Home Improvement TV son Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who popped up for several LMS episodes, Allen said:
Nancy Travis once told me [something] after I called her during Last Man Standing. I said, ‘Have you talked to the girls [who play our daughters] over the summer?’ Then there’s this long pause and she goes, ‘Tim, these aren’t our daughters and I’m not actually your wife.'
For all that it might sound hyperbolic for Tim Allen to instinctively refer to his Last Man Standing daughters as if he was the actresses’ actual father, it speaks to the on-set relationship that he has with co-stars. At least on broadcast sitcoms, since he was called out by a Santa Clauses actress for rude behavior.
It apparently wasn’t only a one-off instance, either, as he also said this about Nancy Travis:
She was so wonderful about it because sometimes when they were having trouble on the show, I’d go, ‘How do you think they feel?’ And she would respond, ‘Tim, they’re actors. We just read [what is on the page but] she’s not really that sad.'
Perhaps if this were a prestige cable or streaming drama with extremely mature and trauma-triggering subject matter, Allen's fatherly instincts might feel more justified. But despite any downer story beats that affected the Baxter daughters Kristin, Mandy and Eve, none of Last Man Standing's were that affecting, at least in my memory. But dads, even ones with purely fictional ties, are gonna worry whether it makes sense or not.
To that end, though, Tim Allen has talked about his real-life relationship with Kaitlyn Dever mirroring the kinship that Eve and Mike had during Last Man Standing's run. Which, in turn, made her exit all the more painful, and made Dever's occasional returns as Eve all the more celebratory, especially with all the scheduling hurdles involved.
Allen's anecdotes about Nancy Travis are quite interesting to hear about at this early point in Shifting Gears' run, since he previously revealed in order to become the "Tom Brady of sitcoms," he really wanted to play a character dealing with the grief of losing a spouse, since that wasn't a route he'd taken previously. But maybe his ulterior motive was just to have fewer co-stars that he might mistake as being his real family members.
Check out how Shifting Gears' Matt continues to restore relationships and vehicles when new episodes air Wednesday nights on ABC at 8:00 p.m. ET, and stream the next day with a Hulu subscription.
