‘Shifting Gears’ Review: Tim Allen and Kat Dennings Are Stuck in Neutral in ABC’s Family Sitcom
Last week, Fox premiered the new comedy Going Dutch, about a ranting conservative father (Denis Leary) forced to reconnect with his estranged liberal daughter (Taylor Misiak). You know the father’s an unreconstructed dinosaur because he laments that it isn’t politically correct to say “midget” anymore — but at least through the episodes I’ve seen, he hasn’t made a joke about anybody’s pronouns, which feels like progress.
This week, ABC premieres Shifting Gears, about a ranting conservative father (Tim Allen) forced to reconnect with his estranged liberal daughter (Kat Dennings). You know the father’s an unreconstructed dinosaur because he laments that it isn’t politically correct to say “dwarf” anymore. But rather than making a joke about anybody’s pronouns, he says he won’t make a joke about anybody’s pronouns, because he hates everybody equally. Which feels like… progress?
It’s early in the year, but it’s already feeling like something hacky is in the water at the ole broadcast sitcom production mill.
A single-cam comedy with an international setting and a military backdrop, Going Dutch at least tries for some variation in tone and format. Does it succeed? Only occasionally.
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Shifting Gears is far more conventional multi-cam stuff, a mighty basic sitcom in which the studio audience roars for Tim Allen’s first on-screen appearance and the intended at-home audience is likely to do the same. (Kat Dennings’ first on-screen appearance also gets applause, but that feels like more of a courtesy.)
The title and premise of Shifting Gears seem to be about, well, shifting gears in your life and your attitude, but the two episodes sent to critics suggest little interest in giving viewers anything other than exactly what they want and expect. So if you have a hankering for a Tim Allen comedy in which a grouchy Boomer goes on rants about nothing in particular because everything in particular is wrong with kids today, Shifting Gears has you taken care of. If that sounds painful, your opinion isn’t likely to shift gears.
Allen plays Matt, a set-in-his-ways widower who runs a garage — technically a “rustomod” if such distinctions matter to you — that restores and enhances classic cars. Everybody knows that if you get Matt started, he’ll ramble about anything related to the state of the world, much to the amusement or chagrin of employees including Gabe (Seann William Scott) and Stitch (Daryl Mitchell) — and possibly one woman who has one line of dialogue in one scene about how she’s a lesbian, but who’s mostly there so that we know Matt has no problems with lesbians.
Enter Riley (Dennings), who was supposed to go to law school and have a big career, but instead got pregnant out of high school and moved to Las Vegas with a bass player. Which is a cardinal sin because Matt may be tolerant of lesbians and people who give their pronouns, but he has no use for bass players.
Matt isn’t wrong, because Riley, finally tired of her husband’s long absences and philandering, has packed things up and moved back to “Los Angeles” — I think, but I’m not really sure and it definitely doesn’t matter — with son Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and daughter Georgia (Barrett Margolis). Riley and Matt have barely spoken for years — not even at her mom’s funeral — but they need to patch up old wounds and Riley needs to figure out what her life is like now that she’s… shifting gears.
Matt also isn’t wrong because the show’s sympathies feel weighted toward his side of the emotional ledger. In Going Dutch, there’s no question that although Misiak’s character is perhaps a little immature, it’s Leary’s character who is going to need to change and evolve as the story progresses. It’s hard to tell if it was creators Mike Scully and Julie Thackery Scully’s initial intent or if that became the execution once Tim Allen became involved, but Shifting Gears is comfortably and consistently on Matt’s side.
The conceit is very much like Last Man Standing if Nancy Travis’ character got the Kevin Can Wait treatment, wherein Allen’s Matt is the last remaining sane man in the world, beset upon on all sides by people whose difficulties — driving, learning, classifying Pluto — leave him flummoxed. (It isn’t as if Matt’s ranting is going to get Pluto reinstated in the celestial hierarchy, but somebody really should tell him that there are circumstances in which “dwarf” is considered acceptable.) Regardless, he isn’t exactly “wrong” about anything, and the show is careful to keep Matt’s political characteristics so inoffensively nebulous that you can imagine having a family meal with him, even if you know who he voted for. And for her part, Riley isn’t going around protecting trans rights or showing off her AOC bicep tattoo.
When Riley suggests they have a conversation “like rational adults,” Matt shoots back, “Have you watched the news lately? That’s not a thing anymore.” But Shifting Gears yearns for a fantastical world in which it kinda is, primarily by making everything so fuzzy and non-specific that the action might as well be taking place on Pluto, which remains not-a-planet.
In lieu of detail or nuance, Shifting Gears is counting on the redoubtable charm of its leads to cover for the elements that either make no sense or, more frequently, just aren’t interesting. Allen clearly wants people to know that he’s been getting in shape — that he is himself a vintage car given a contemporary polish — so he wears a lot of tight t-shirts and pitches his bouts of pique at the back row of that appreciative audience. It isn’t like he isn’t good at this, but the possibility that he might be even better if any of his dialogue were funny lingers.
The same is true of Dennings, who squandered her impeccable timing — half deadpan, half sing-song — on 138 episodes of 2 Broke Girls, detoured to two seasons of the somewhat better Dollface, and now returns to the broader terrain of broadcast. Nothing anybody says about Riley adds up to a character, so Dennings just leans into her familiar sarcasm.
The rest of the ensemble is, thus far, blurring into the blandness of the show’s two or three sets. Of the two kids, Margolis’ enthusiasm about true crime podcasts generated my only actual laugh from the two episodes I watched; I’m not exactly sure what Simkins is playing, but it isn’t “anxiety,” which is his only discussed personality trait (Matt doesn’t believe in “anxiety”). Scott is far too funny and engaged an actor to be settling for a character whose primary trait is “amiably dumb,” but the show is already hinting at possible romance with Riley, so maybe that will improve things. Mitchell doesn’t even have “amiably dumb” to work with and the scene in which Matt stumbles over how he’s supposed to describe Stitch’s disability is one of several moments at which my soul died.
The strange truth is that I watched Shifting Gears wishing for more moments at which my soul died, because that’s at least a thing, a feeling, a reaction generated by the show and the voice of the show. It wasn’t that long ago that ABC’s family comedy brand was the industry standard — shows with a common heart and general sensibility, but each with a distinct perspective and worldview. Mostly, I watched Shifting Gears thinking that it was Last Man Standing without the guts to come right out and just be Last Man Standing.
