Nancy Travis‘ guest spot on ABC’s Shifting Gears featured a major nod to her time with Tim Allen on Last Man Standing.
“There’s a wink in the episode where you know that there’s a past,” Travis, 63, exclusively told Us Weekly about how the sitcom acknowledged her past with Allen, 71. “People that are fans and loyal followers of Tim’s shows will really love that inside joke.”
During her appearance on the Wednesday, February 12, episode, Travis played Charlotte, who connects with Allen’s Matt when they both visit their late partners for Valentine’s Day. Matt isn’t sure he is ready to start dating though, which he tells Charlotte at the end of their second chance encounter.
Her response? Charlotte says she doesn’t mind because Matt reminds her of the “last man” she was with before meeting him. The tongue-in-cheek dialogue was meant to reference Travis and Allen’s sitcom Last Man Standing, which ran from 2011 to 2021.
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“You wonder how Nancy Travis is going to come back into this Shifting Gears world and I think it’s a unique and clever way that they’ve engineered this,” Travis noted to Us. “I will say — even on Last Man Standing — it’s almost like a trademark of Tim’s shows where there are winks. Because the people that have followed his career from Home Improvement, his stand-up comedy, Last Man Standing and now Shifting Gears, they know the details of these stories and these characters so deeply.”
She continued: “They’re looking for a little inside joke or nod. There were many of them on Last Man Standing so I knew there would be something. I just didn’t know where it would come or how it would come. Viewers will be looking for it too so it is a nice little bow they put on our scenes together.”
Before Matt, Allen was known for playing Tim “The Toolman” Taylor on the ABC sitcom Home Improvement, which ran from 1991 to 1999. He moved on to Last Man Standing, where he played Mike for nine seasons on ABC. Shifting Gears has allowed him to acknowledge his Last Man Standing past by bringing in Travis, who played his onscreen wife for nearly a decade.
“Tim is nothing if not loyal. So it was great to walk on that set and see most of the crew was from Last Man Standing. The director John Pasquin did so many episodes of Last Man Standing and is a personal friend. It was just so great to feel this sense of reunion,” Travis told Us. “I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody from Last Man Standing shows up on Shifting Gears in one way or another. If Tim has his way, he’ll make sure that everybody from [costar Kat Dennings‘] 2 Broke Girls comes on too.”
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While Travis was thrilled to share the screen with Allen again, she revealed to Us that she wasn’t looking to play another version of his wife, saying, “It was really fun to be able to just come in and have a whole wealth of knowledge and rapport working with Tim. In terms of comedic rhythm, knowing how to set up a joke and how to tell a story together, it was great to be able to take that and apply it to Charlotte.”
Shifting Gears gave Travis and Allen the space to collaborate without any expectations.
“I do enjoy working with him but I think that it’s fun to explore new and different relationships between characters. It is very meta — maybe too meta,” she told Us. “I really like what they created, which is a soulmate friend. Maybe it’s like the ghost of his ex-wife — Vanessa — who comes in the spirit of somebody else. But I like the nuances of what they created with this different relationship.”
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As for where Travis thinks her and Allen’s characters from Last Man Standing are now? The actress didn’t have a specific idea but several more broad possibilities.
“When we would film a scene on Last Man Standing, one would be as written and then we would joke around about what would be the most extreme version of this scene. We would call that version when the door slams shut,” she shared. If this show was on network TV, it would probably be Vanessa and Mike in rocking chairs bickering. But who knows what it would be when the door slams shut if they were on cable?”
Shifting Gears airs on ABC Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET before streaming the next day on Hulu.
