I only watched this because Fox has baseball on Tuesdays the rest of the month, but I was really, really pleasantly surprised. A sort of inverse "Home Improvement", with one father in a household full of the fairer sex, it's a very, very traditional sitcom. Multi-camera, laugh track/live audience, the works.
That being said, the cast is good, and some of the jokes really landed. Tim Allen's character is several degrees smarter than Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, and while his odes to the decline of masculinity are more than a bit of a caricature, he's shown to be a good father and husband the rest of the time. Nancy Travis's wife character avoids most of the sitcom mother tropes; not only does she work a longer day than her husband, she's shown to a regular drinker and she screws up more or less as often as he does. The toilet gag with the camera panning over from the adult toilet to the training potty had me laughing out loud. The oldest daughter (a very young working single mother) is hard-working, pleasant and shown to be a good mother to her little boy. The youngest daughter is a tom boy that gets along the best with the father, leaving only the middle daughter as an irritating sitcom character.
I can enjoy just about any show if I like the characters. And I like the characters here. Still probably won't stick with it once "Glee" comes back in November, but I'll probably be back the next couple weeks.
That being said, the cast is good, and some of the jokes really landed. Tim Allen's character is several degrees smarter than Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, and while his odes to the decline of masculinity are more than a bit of a caricature, he's shown to be a good father and husband the rest of the time. Nancy Travis's wife character avoids most of the sitcom mother tropes; not only does she work a longer day than her husband, she's shown to a regular drinker and she screws up more or less as often as he does. The toilet gag with the camera panning over from the adult toilet to the training potty had me laughing out loud. The oldest daughter (a very young working single mother) is hard-working, pleasant and shown to be a good mother to her little boy. The youngest daughter is a tom boy that gets along the best with the father, leaving only the middle daughter as an irritating sitcom character.
I can enjoy just about any show if I like the characters. And I like the characters here. Still probably won't stick with it once "Glee" comes back in November, but I'll probably be back the next couple weeks.
