Season 2 of Shifting Gears is bringing more guest stars — and multiple love interests for Tim Allen.
ABC released the official trailer on Wednesday, September 17, which showed Eve (Jenna Elfman) and Charlotte (Nancy Travis) returning to the show after previously sharing the screen with Matt (Allen).
Shifting Gears is also introducing several new faces, including cameos from Lori Greiner, Lilly Singh, Gabriel Iglesias, Mookie Betts and Home Improvement alums Patricia Richardson, Debbe Dunning and Richard Karn.
Us Weekly previously shared an exclusive first look at Allen’s reunion with his former costars. While details about how Richardson, 74, Dunning, 59, and Karn, 69, factor into the plot have yet to be announced, ABC previously teased that they “show up to support” Matt (Allen) in “an unexpected way.”
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Allen, 72, also used his new hit sitcom to reunite with Travis, 63, after she originally played his wife on Last Man Standing.
“Charlotte is a catalyst for him. It was fun to play the role of someone who has a shared experience with Tim’s character, which is true in real life,” Travis exclusively told Us in February. “We shared the experience of making Last Man Standing and at the same time my Shifting Gears character is a stranger — just somebody that Matt meets who can inform his life.”
Despite reprising the role of Charlotte in season 2, Travis said she wasn’t looking to play Allen’s wife on screen again. (They previously played fictional couple Mike and Vanessa Baxter from 2011 to 2021.)
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“It was great not to play the wife [this time]. It was great. 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,” Travis noted at the time. “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.”
She added: “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. 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.”
Shifting Gears returns to ABC Wednesday, October 1, at 8 p.m. ET before streaming the next day on Hulu.
