Shifting Gears “Restoration”
Written by Julie Thacker Scully & Mike Scully
Directed by John Pasquin
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm EST on ABC
With nearly 400 episodes of network sitcoms under his belt, one might wonder what challenge lies in Shifting Gears, ABC’s latest multicamera comedy, for Tim Allen. If “Restoration”, the show’s incredibly unfunny first episode, is any indication, the answer is a resounding ‘not much. Of course, this may be a welcome sound for any Last Man Standing fans dying for a sitcom where trite sociopolitical touchpoints are passed off as convulsion-inducing comedy, but it will certainly be a disappointment for anyone hoping the Allen and Kat Dennings-led sitcom would offer any sort of new take on the familiar premise of “absent child comes home to reconcile with their arrogantly conservative dad” (a genre whose modern pinnacle still remains the first season of The Ranch, a hill I’m still willing to die on).
Shifting Gears‘s first episode (written by creators Mike and Julie Thacker Scully before departing the series) asks one important question: what if Tim Allen had dead wife? (which, according to interviews, was a requirement of him taking on the role). The answer, unsurprisingly, is Allen throwing around limp punchlines about mocktails and Nancy Pelosi, as predictably curmudgeonly auto shop owner Matt Parker, a man who loves hate-watching the news as much as he likes to shame his daughter for her life choices, Allen (who is executive producing alongside a slew of other producers) is right in his lane, offering a character only slight less impassioned and more resigned than the brazenly conservative sports shop owner he played on Last Man Standing (which, to its credit, at least aspired to something a bit more Lear-esque, even if the handful of episodes I saw in its post-season one transformation were often incredibly lame).
It wouldn’t be too hard to see an intriguing little sitcom about a family trying to reassemble without the matriarch that held them together (ala Frasier‘s original premise), thanks to the always-welcome presence of Dennings, and the promising bit of rapport we see between the workers at the auto shop (which features NCIS: New Orleans vet Daryl Chill Mitchell). However, Shifting Gears is saddled by some incredibly rigid, unfunny writing (and a forgettable, trope-laden premise; at least Going Dutch gives itself an interesting locale), never allowing any of its characters to be much else than funnels for more Allen-centric punchlines, a conceit that wears quite thin by the end of the episode’s interminably laughless 21 minutes.
Perhaps the funniest part of Shifting Gears‘s pilot is that there’s a glimpse of something really special underneath the surface – it’s a brief glimmer, but presents an alternate reality where a recalibrated version of this series could really work, even if it only wants to traffic in superficial, audience-pleasing cliche. About halfway through the episode, Riley takes her car to her father’s shop to have one of his employees, Gabriel (a criminally underused Seann William Scott) look at it while they reminisce about old times – and before you ask, yes of course Gabriel had a crush on Riley in high school, before she ran off to build a life with her musician boyfriend.
When the two reminisce and very lightly flirt about old memories, is the one moment it feels like there is some weight given to the passage of time, and the chasm formed between Riley and her community since she left in her youth. It’s a brief moment, and one so unassuming it could easily be forgotten – especially when the episode makes much broader, hackier attempts at finding resonance within its characters, like when Riley and Matt briefly reconcile over the dead mother’s still-dirty flour sifter.
(Worth noting – the dead mother in question is never given a name in this episode, even though we get a very somber, beat-by-beat recap of her death by Matt).
Though “Restoration” gets off to a numbingly dull start, the mid-episode scene with Riley and Gabriel offered a glimpse of a different series, one absent of Matt’s geriatric complaining – or really, his general presence. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a Shifting Gears where Riley comes home with her kids to an empty home absent of Matt’s “these kids are soft” shtick echoing off the walls, and has to resolve the generational conflicts left behind through the people she meets in her life – including Gabriel, who could still be a great vessel for Shifting Gears to ground its story in some kind of “liberal vs. conservative” perspective, if it’s really married to making that cultural conflict part of the show’s DNA (which again, I don’t see anything wrong with – King of the Hill is a great show, even though Hank Hill and I aren’t seeing eye to eye on most things politically).
If done well, one could easily see the different elements of Shifting Gears coalescing into something a little closer to say, Mom: able to hedge cliche jokes and undercooked characters with really strong, defined characters and some emotional honesty. However, we can’t spill ink over something that doesn’t exist; instead we have this version of Shifting Gears, a miserable attempt at antagonistic comedy, attempting to agitate and antagonize its characters with low-effort ideas and an incredibly superficial, misguided sense of self. In that sense, one might say its the 2 Broke Girls of boomer dad comedies… unfortunately, they wouldn’t be too far off.