When you think about the best sitcoms of all time, it’s incredibly likely that your mind will go back to several shows that focused on families. And whenever you have a family comedy, you will usually get to the floundering teen years of at least one character, which is exactly what happened on the Tim Allen classic, Home Improvement, when Mark Taylor (the youngest son) went goth. While that storyline was considered a bit awkward by many, you can bet it pales in comparison to how Mark’s portrayer found out what inspired it.
What Inspired Goth Mark On Home Improvement?
While Home Improvement lead Tim Allen has gone on to star in two other family sitcoms (the also long-running Last Man Standing and the 2025 TV schedule entry Shifting Gears), few can forget the popular ‘90s comedy that put him on the map. The show featured Allen as a married father of three boys, with his character’s youngest son being Mark, who was played by Taran Noah Smith.
Fans will likely remember that Mark went through a change for part of his teen years, when he became “Goth Mark.” This phase definitely worried his parents, and felt rather sudden for fans, but it was even more awkward for Smith, once he was confronted with the inspiration for his character’s attitude adjustment. As he recently told the Outgrown podcast:
The whole storyline of the older brothers beating up on me or teasing me didn't really work anymore because now I was taller than both of them. I found out later the head writer on the show, he had a son that was right around my age. And after about halfway through the season, I'm in wardrobe — black fingernails, and dog collar and all the stuff on — and I went backstage and came face to face with his son, who was not in wardrobe, but looked just like me. And we had this very awkward moment of like, 'Oh, I'm your dad's way of kind of dealing with you. Sorry.'
Mark had always been portrayed as being the most artistic and introspective of the boys, who was considered dorky by his older brothers and was pranked/tormented by them on an incredibly regular basis. Eventually, Mark’s teenage years saw him befriend a goth kid named Ronnie, which led to him starting to wear all black, painting his fingernails black (he flirted with black lipstick at one point, as well) and even wearing a dog collar and shaving his head for a time.
As Smith noted, when he became the “little” brother who’d actually outgrown his older siblings, it didn’t quite work as well to have him be, essentially, bullied by them anymore. But, who could have guessed that Mark’s sudden shift was prompted by the head writer having a son who’d also had the same goth turn in real life. Can you imagine just hanging out backstage and being confronted with your mirror image and both of you realizing what was happening? I’m getting second-hand embarrassment just thinking about this situation!
By the time Home Improvement ended (with some behind the scenes controversy), Mark was well back to being his old self, and turned out just fine. And, I hope the same is true for that writer’s kid, whether he’s still rocking that dog collar or not.
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