‘Shifting Gears’ Is Tim Allen’s Worst Show Yet—a Low Bar

As the United States enters 2025 feeling more divided than ever, there are a few schools of thought in terms of how (or whether) to address those divisions in mainstream entertainment. Some feel that what the world needs now is an escape from daily rancor, something that sitcoms, for example, might be well-suited to provide. Others prefer a style that’s more confrontational and cathartic about these seemingly irreconcilable differences—which also happens to be something a sharp comedy can pull off.

Shifting Gears, an all-star sitcom featuring Tim Allen and Kat Dennings and premiering Jan. 8 on ABC, opts for a third and dispiritingly familiar approach: pay repeated and tedious lip service to cultural divides via canned rants and musty ripostes, uniting everyone in the purgatorial state of soundstage banter.

At first, it seems a little weird that Allen’s primary reference point for Matt, the ostensibly new car-mechanic character he plays on Shifting Gears, appears to be his Mike from Last Man Standing, the ABC-then-Fox sitcom about a conservative crank in a family of women, rather than Tim from Home Improvement, his signature megahit about a similarly handy man.

But the lower-profile Last Man Standing logged nearly as many episodes as the juggernaut Home Improvement in its decade on the air, so maybe it’s seen as the Allen show more people know today—or maybe Allen just revels in playing the cantankerous truth-teller, enjoying the delusion that he’s a modern-day Archie Bunker (or the misconception that Archie Bunker was an aspirational figure).

Matt, one of those common-sense conservatives TV writers lovingly protect from the unpleasant beliefs they may vote for, presumably spends his days yelling into a void and/or at his employees until a familiar vehicle rolls back into his life, from which emerges his daughter Riley (Dennings). The sharp-tongued young woman left home as a pregnant teenager, married her musician boyfriend, and has only made occasional contact with her father since, including an icy-sounding interaction at her mom’s funeral.

Now she’s back, divorce imminent, desperate for a roof to put over the heads of her two kids: awkward teenage son Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and sitcom-precocious tween daughter Georgia (Barrett Margolis). This throws her back into conflict with her traditionally minded father, who agrees to host the family and has some thoughts about the habits and foibles of Kids Today, if you can believe it. Screens! Uber accounts! Pronouns! Individualized learning plans! Where do they come up with this stuff?

Shifting Gears obviously doesn’t intend to push buttons. Or, rather, it intends to mash at buttons indiscriminately, in hopes that the sounds they make—Nancy Pelosi! Breakdown of civility! Throwing shade?—will resemble jokes.

This is a soul-crushing development from Mike Scully, who co-created the show with wife Julie Thacker Scully. They’ve both written multiple episodes of The Simpsons, an institution that Scully also ran for a time. His four seasons as executive producer were uneven by that show’s standards, but they’re masterworks compared to anything that happens during the two Shifting Gears episodes that ABC provided for review. The show is not merely unfunny; it features punchlines that should embarrass anyone who’s ever had a quick scroll of Facebook. Get ready to laugh: Matt claims to not actually mind pronouns because he “hates everybody” equally!

Perhaps worse, these third-hand cringers are deployed in service of stories that offer neither the relatability of real-life situations nor the heightened craziness of farce. The second episode kicks off with an overwhelmed Riley realizing she’s booked an important lawyer meeting on the same night as their new school’s open house, setting up a plot where she reluctantly sends Matt in her place.

Instead, she … immediately cancels the meeting with the lawyer and attends the open house alongside Matt. This then leads into an A-plot where Riley inexplicably drinks herself into taking offense at small talk made by the school’s friendly vice principal, and the episode features a baffling moment where Allen mimes getting high while staring at a fidget spinner. Weird gag, but I knew how he felt, if only because the whole episode seemed to be sweaty fidgeting.

That’s a lot of sweat to tolerate just to hang out with an avatar of boomer grievances. The show tries to create an equal give-and-take when doling out Riley’s rejoinders to Matt’s right-lite talking points, and it succeeds mainly in making everyone involved seem hopelessly cornball. (At this point, Dennings is so practiced in the field of mark-hitting punchline delivery that any flavor has gone out of the tart rebel-girl persona she showed on 2 Broke Girls.)

Yet somehow the material attracted not only Allen and Denning, but fellow comedy vets Daryl Mitchell, Seann William Scott, and Jenna Elfman. (Though she doesn’t appear in the first two episodes, Elfman is slated to join later in a recurring role.) Scott seems the happiest to just wisecrack and chill, playing a far less manic character than the hyper-enthusiastic cretins that were his 2000s-era specialties.

In fact, almost everyone on the show is more effective when they’re stepping back from punchline duty, perhaps not a promising sign for a situation comedy. The only surprises Shifting Gears can offer early on are a few non-comic moments where Allen and Dennings inhabit the genuine moments of dumbstruck grief they feel over losing a wife and mother, respectively. There’s a hint of rawness just beneath the show’s facile generational-differences shtick, as if everyone is concealing their actual weariness at another term—whether four years, 10 years, or 12 episodes—of all-sides bickering.

Allen and Dennings may be playing characters as stubbornly set in their ways as any political partisan, but just as with talking heads on the TV news that Matt seems to both love and hate, it’s clear this is all just for cynical, empty show.