There are multiple jokes about separating families at border crossings in the first two episodes, and each time, the idea of forcibly tearing children from their parents is a chortle-worthy blip. This is occasionally merely eye-roll worthy, and sometimes it’s so jarring that it jolts you out of the story. Mike Baxter is still up on his soapboxes, and whatever deeper sentiment the show is aiming toward, it’s still delivered alongside Mike’s ideological bent, usually in the form of a joking aside. This is not to say that Last Man Standing has abandoned all of its old ways. It means the revived Last Man Standing could turn out to be a better show than I’d expected. They’re not about taking a stance they’re goopier scenes about family history and the legacy we give to our children and, unless I’m very much mistaken, about feelings. And yet, especially in the show’s second episode, there are a few scenes that work. They did not arrive, or when they did, they didn’t pack much of a wallop.
I kept watching the show’s first two episodes for that old Last Man Standing feeling, for its patented eyebrow-raising Baxter jeremiads. Whatever you may think about the show’s politics, its engine was usually Mike as the lone voice of reason railing against newfangled ideals and perceived cultural boogeymen. So the near-perfect replication of the show to its former - well, glory seems dubious, but you get the idea - oddly renders it less compelling. In the time since Last Man Standing was last on the air, the world has caught up with Mike. Mike Baxter is the same guy, but he’s no longer the odd man out, no longer the only one brave enough to spout nonsense about the danger of trigger warnings.
#Last man standing cancelled series
(Goes without saying, really.) But why stop there, when you can also take a stance on: vegetarianism, immigration, teaching children to be strong, fracking, the meaning of Christmas, and local school politics!Īfter getting cancelled in 2016, six seasons into its run on ABC, the show has been revived on Fox, and the thing that transfixed me about the original series has become less compelling. For Mike Baxter, men should still be men. And rather than mostly whining about how men should be men, the beloved topic of Home Improvement, the Last Man Standing dad character took a broader view of the world. The Tim Allen character of my childhood, the grunting one from Home Improvement, had been revived as a wealthier, grumpier, less self-aware version of the same man, now harried by his wife and three daughters rather than three sons. There, in all its well-lit, punchline-laden, couch-pointed-at-the-camera anodyne sitcom glory, was Tim Allen’s Mike Baxter, yelling about disrespecting the flag and old-school masculinity and safe spaces and kids these days and high taxes, years before Trump’s candidacy took hold. But I cannot deny that on first watching the original series, I was transfixed. I did not think it was a great show then, and I still don’t love it now.
Earlier this year, I had the bizarre experience of sitting down and watching a bunch of the original ABC run of Last Man Standing for the first time.
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