When we reviewed the first season of Shifting Gears, Tim Allen’s latest sitcom, we half-joked that no matter what we said about it, the show would run until well into the 2030s because it stars Tim Allen. Well, the series is now entering its second season, and it’s piling up the sitcom vets as either recurring cast memebers or one-off guest stars in order to assure a long run. In the season premiere, for instance, Allen has a reunion with cast members from not one, but both of his previous long-running sitcoms.
Opening Shot: Gabe (Seann William Scott) and Stitch (Daryl Mitchell) walk into the vintage car shop where they work, and Gabe is happy that their boss Matt (Tim Allen) hasn’t seen them come in late. That’s when Matt slides out from under a car and lets the hydraulic sliding board lift him to a sitting position. “He is risen,” jokes Matt.
The Gist: Also walking into the shop is Matt’s daughter Riley (Katt Dennings), who works at the dance studio upstairs for Eve (Jenna Elfman) and her coworker Amelie (Carson Fagerbakke), looking for a screwdriver. Gabe reminds her that the biggest rule at her father’s shop is that tools never get lent out. “You may be his daughter, but them tools are his babies,” says Stitch.
When she goes to ask Matt, he of course refuses, but then the subject of Eve comes up; Riley still thinks Matt hates her, but in reality Matt is upset at seeing her, knowing that they shared a kiss three months prior but he didn’t text her the entire summer while she was away on a gig.
Riley is also struggling with romantic issues, wondering if she should tell Gabe how she feels, but is afraid that doing so is going to ruin their friendship. It doesn’t help that Gabe comes to her and tells her he wants to talk in private. Riley’s teenage son Carter (Maxwell Simkins) also has a crush, and he dresses for the first day of school like he’s an extra in The Sopranos because that’s what AI suggested; his sister Georgia (Barrett Margolis) is mostly in love with her own confidence.
Matt runs into Eve when she returns to the dance studio, and, while annoyed at not getting a text, says they can just “hang out and do whatever,” which they both know means sex. She’s OK with him not being ready.
Matt goes and visits his wife’s final resting spot at the mausoleum, looking for some guidance and runs into Charlotte (Nancy Travis); they’ve become acquaintances because Charlotte’s husband’s tomb is next to Matt’s wife. She encourages Matt to come with her to a grief support group that she used to go to regularly. When they get there, he sees some faces that he might have been familiar with in a past life (Debbie Dunning, Patricia Richardson, Richard Karn).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With the presence of Travis, Dunning, Richardson and Karn in the first episode, Shifting Gears feels more closely related to Home Improvement and Last Man Standing than ever.
Our Take: Sitcom veterans Mike Scully and Julie Thacker-Scully created Shifting Gears, but Michelle Nader has been the showrunner since the first episode after the pilot. And you can tell that the series started to shift gears (pun intended) during its first season, relying less on Allen ranting about wokeness, and even trying less to mesh Allen’s and Dennings’ very different comic sensibilities. The first episode of Season 2 shows that Nader and her writers are concentrating more on Matt trying to move on after his wife’s death and Riley trying to figure out her feelings for Gabe as well as where she’s going in her life in general.
It’s certainly a better formula than what we saw in the early going of the first season, though there are still a lot of bad gags that make Dennings’ last multi-cam sitcom, 2 Broke Girls, look like a laugh riot by comparison. Like when Riley asks to borrow a screwdriver, Stitch jokes that he can’t have vodka at work anymore, to which Riley replies, “No, the righty-tighty kind. You know I can’t be lefty-loosey at work.” That kind of lame wordplay would have gotten booed out of a lot of writers’ rooms, and we’re always surprised when they slip through the cracks on sitcoms run by veterans like Nader (then again, Nader also worked on 2 Broke Girls, so maybe we shouldn’t assume anything).
We wish the Home Improvement reunion was handled a bit better than it was, but maybe at least one of the triumvirate of grief group mainstays will come back and give us more from their characters (our bet is Karn, who;s character very much seemed like he played what a widowed Al Borland would be like). Putting Travis in these scene, which made the reunion cover both of Allen’s long-running sitcoms, was a clever move. But we also hope that her character Charlotte returns, not only because the chemistry that Allen and Travis had for 9 seasons on Last Man Standing was still there, but because Charlotte is very good at calling Matt on his BS.
The best moments were between Allen and Elfman. As usual, Elfman plays a fiercely independent woman who doesn’t pussyfoot around what she wants. Matt seems to be the same, but we see more of Allen’s stammering goofy side when Matt is around her. Their coupling is promising for the show because it’ll make Matt less of a cartoon and more of an actual sitcom character we might give a rat’s patoot about.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Georgia arranges for Carter’s crush to be her tutor so she can get the two of them talking. Both Riley and Matt think he’ll screw up this golden opportunity.
Sleeper Star: We have been fans of Daryl “Chill” Mitchell for a very long time, and we hate that all he has to do on this show is sit behind a sewing machine (he’s called “Stitch” because he works on custom upholstery for the cars the shop works on) and make quips.
Most Pilot-y Line: That “righty-tighty/lefty-loosie” line we cited above is pretty darn terrible.
Our Call: SKIP IT. While we think Shifting Gears is slowly finding its legs, we only laughed once during the Season 2 premiere, and really don’t have much confidence the show will get any funnier than that.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.