Tim Allen and Jenna Elfman‘s characters broke up on Shifting Gears — but is there a chance they could reconcile?
“Coming up, you’ll see it’s not over yet and it’s really a different thing for a comic to play this,” Allen, 72, teased during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly about his character Matt’s future with Eve (Elfman). “In the show, by design there’s more drama to lay the comedy on top of. It’s something I’ve always liked to do.”
The hit ABC series, which returns with new episodes on Wednesday, January 7, will pick up after Eve got a job opportunity that took her away from Matt for months. Despite having a conversation about trying to make things work, Matt ultimately decided it was better for them to part ways — for now.
“The reality of the story is that it was working and it was really romantic for the show,” he noted. “[While] they’re not really a couple yet, it just was really sad. Both of us really got affected by the writing of it and played it very well.”
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Shifting Gears follows father Matt and his estranged daughter, Riley (Kat Dennings), as they find themselves living together and working to repair their relationship. It’s the first time Allen has starred on a sitcom where his character isn’t married. (Allen’s characters on past sitcoms Home Improvement and Last Man Standing were already in committed relationships when each series began.)
“My preference wasn’t to get into a relationship this quick,” Allen told Us about playing a widower. “[With Jenna], serendipitously, it really worked — she and I together. I’ve worked with her before in a movie and I know her and the two characters are so opposite. It didn’t look like anything was going to happen — certainly from my point of view — because I said I wasn’t really ready for it, personally, in the show.”
Allen was pleasantly surprised by the dynamic between Matt and Eve.
“It just emerged. As it turns out, we really connect on camera,” he recalled. “So I had to compromise a bit and say, ‘This is moving along quicker than I thought it should.’”
After beginning his career as a comedian in the ’70s, Allen made a mark in Hollywood as Tim “The Toolman” Taylor on the ABC’s Home Improvement, which scored him a Golden Globe Award, and later played Mike Baxter on Last Man Standing. On the big screen, Allen voiced Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story franchise and brought Santa Claus to life in The Santa Clause movies.
While Allen’s previous sitcoms have often pulled details from his real life, Shifting Gears was different.
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“I’m not a widower. That’s the biggest change in this whole script is that when they pitched me to do a new show, I wanted to be a guy that’s dealing with grief and still active in life,” the actor, who will celebrate 20 years of marriage with wife Jane Hajduk this fall, told Us. “The people in my life that I really am amazed at have gone through so much suffering and still show up every day and are good to other people and don’t get held down by grief. I wanted to honor that.”
He continued: “Then the studio asked, ‘Would you mind if eventually he could start dating?’ They thought it would be kind of fun to see Tim Allen in a romantic relationship. We made a compromise and they allowed me to be a widower and allowed me to do that. That’s a big difference. I’m not in that genre anymore of romance in my personal life. I’m very different than the characters I play.”
Allen acknowledged that his past shows both ran for nearly a decade — but he wasn’t sure what to expect when signing on for Shifting Gears.
“On Home Improvement, I never thought of lineage,” he said. “On Last Man Standing, it was easy to see the growth. … This group of writers and the showrunner [on Shifting Gears], they are really geniuses. They keep coming up with stories.”
Shifting Gears airs on ABC Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET before streaming the next day on Hulu.
