While a lot of us are enthralled with Tim Allen’s antics on “Last Man Standing,” an entire generation will never stop seeing him as the handy dad in “Home Improvement.” While there are no current plans to reboot the series, the start says that he’d be up for donning Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor’s Binder Utility Belt once more. He also noticed that if any company were to pitch it, the entire cast might be willing to jump on board a reboot.
Always In His Mind
TV Line mentions that Allen states he’s always thinking about a potential reunion for the show. However, the star says that he’s not interested in seeing the revival run for a whole season. It’s more likely that the reboot will last for an extra-long episode. Allen figures an hour to an hour and a half should suffice. He says that he’s enthralled with the idea of seeing what in-universe changes have happened while the cameras were silent. A reunion or revival would likely see the boys all grown up and maybe even moved out or married. For many of us who grew up on the series, it has a lot of emotional pull.
What Made Home Improvement So Good?
The fact is that it takes a lot for a series to stick around for eight seasons. In between Tim’s best cabinet painting and power tool hijinks, there always was an undertone of seriousness. Several of us learned hard life lessons from the show, and the cast was as much a part of our own family as we were of theirs. Deep, well-developed characters coupled with believable yet quirky writing set Home Improvement apart from other sitcoms of the era. It didn’t fully move into the modern era, taking its cues from such family-friendly classics as Growing Pains. But this same nostalgia is also the reason it didn’t make it past eight seasons. Fans are grateful, however. If current series are anything to judge by, TV shows that cross eight seasons are doomed for the garbage bin of cinema.
Do We Want to See a Revival?
This question is difficult to answer. Home Improvement and Tim Taylor were products of a different time in America. Tim’s new series, “Last Man Standing,” takes many of the tropes that made Tim Taylor so endearing and transfers it to a modern setting. There are Mike Baxter’s blogs filling in for Tool Time. Yet they aren’t the same individual. Tim Taylor was more of an over-the-top character, even in his home life, and Mike Baxter isn’t. The comedy is there (Tim’s a funny guy, and they have good writers), but the crux is whether this will be a Home Improvement episode or fanservice for a series that closed out more than a decade ago. While we’d love to see Home Improvement back on the small screen, we should really consider whether we actually want it or we want what we remember of the series. Bringing it back out without the same gravitas it had when it was on TV is doing the IP a disservice.
