We’ve looked at a lot great failures in television over the course of the website’s history. Most of them were chosen through careful consideration, after selecting twelve of the worst cable and network channels and making each of them send tribute shows to fight to the death, allowing only one to remain. However, I’m not going to lie to you- when I decided to review Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing, it was based on no careful thought processes or prudent decisions, intentionally, because, let’s face it, nothing with Tim Allen in it ever is. This is a man who elected to be a talking Santa Claus, a plastic Santa Claus, and an embittered Tim Allen at a Santa Claus-Themed Disney World, all in chronological order. A lot of celebrities like to be in kids movies so their children have something with them in it to watch. Chris Rock can’t exactly come home from a long day at work and show his kids his latest HBO special, which was why he was in all those shitty Madagascar movies. But three Santa Clauses- that’s just setting your standards too low. The only good thing he was ever in was Toy Story, and since then, it’s all been downhill, thanks to another unfeeling process in Hollywood- Eddie Murphying. You take a comedian with a lot of talent who decides to be in a movie for his kids, then maybe another movie for kids, and then it’s a slippery slope to Meet Dave. The same thing happened with Adam Sandler. Sorry, but people in drag isn’t funny- even when Monty Python did it.
The thing is I was really disappointed by Last Man Standing. I expected something hilariously lame, and enjoyably bad- something as unnecessary as the cousin-love in Ruby and the Rockits, something as flamboyantly jingoistic as Sarah Palin’s Alaska, something as fucking racist and homophobic as The Jeff Dunham Show, or something as simply unwatchable and filled with terror as Hanna Montana Forever. What I got was the most generic situation comedy since Just Shoot Me. If you don’t know, the premise is that Tim Allen is a man- in a house entirely filled with women! I was at least expecting some hilarious sexism, or for one girl to get their period and him not know what to do. But no, none of that- just set ups and punch lines and undiscovered teen jailbait and sets that don’t look like any home anyone has ever lived in and some inexplicable subplot about Basque nationalism. Every scene in this show is as generic and boring as every scene in Lucky Louie that didn’t feature Pamela Adlon, Louis CK, or Emma Stone, except with far less swearing. Go watch it if you want- you aren’t going to laugh, you aren’t going to cry, and you aren’t going to feel. You will look at a screen for twenty-one minutes, your eyes and ears will receive sensory information, you will breathe and oxygenate your blood and form memories of your own boredom.
Bad television should at least be entertaining. For example, I watched a SyFy Channel original movie the other night called Seattle Superstorm, which featured a sentient raincloud attacking the birthplace of hip Starbucks assholes. It features the clumsiest dialogue since last week’s episode of Reba, and special effects that would have been high tech and cutting edge during them time when a movie ended when the cinematographer waved a cloth in front of the camera. There’s a goddamn scene in Seattle Superstorm when one of the researchers or whatever has to go outside in the storm, and he literally lightly jogs as lightning slowly strikes him in a wave of smoke they put in front of the green screen a couple of inches too far to the right. And let me tell you, I laughed harder during every second of that shitty movie than I did during the whole twenty-one minutes of Last Man Standing. Which is why I’m proposing a re-tool of Tim Allen’s latest show- the series is now going to be animated and about a hip family of otters living in Seattle, when all of a sudden, a new set of neighbors moves in and (record screech) they’re all sentient death clouds! Tim Allen’s the leading Otter in a house full of woman otters in TV’s wildest comedy- Last Mustalidae Standing! Sit back and watch the hilarity unfold! It’s all on ABC’s Must See TV- the wackiest night of the week.
