'Home Improvement' to 'Last Man Standing': Tim Allen Says Men Are Still Being Backed Into a Corner

Randy Holmes/ABC

Tim Allen on ABC's "Last Man Standing."

Tim Allen returns to his ABC roots with a new sitcom, Last Man Standing. He told reporters at the Television Critics Association (TCA) Press Tour on Monday that the show was basically his hit 90s sitcom, Home Improvement, but flip-flopped. He plays a man surrounded by his family of four women who’s trying to claim his rightful place.

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“This is a little bit elevated situation from the last sitcom I did,” Allen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s still the same interest I have. What do you want us to do? What eventually would women want if God knows they could build a man? And what would it look like?”

Sure, this all sounds like the manly grunts we’ve heard from the actor before, but he says that’s because not much has changed for his gender over his long career.

“When I started standup, it seems like a forever ago, my act hasn’t changed much,” he tells us. “There’s an element of anger in me that [men’s] territory has been chipped away little bit by little bit. That’s how I feel, probably not how women would describe it.”

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Allen’s new show arrives amidst ABC’s upcoming lineup of several series, which try to make sense of or define the modern man, including Man Up and Work It. But, Allen says the problem with men is the same problem they’ve had for years: Women are constantly trying to change them.

“There’s this little bark. I’ve always felt that men are pushed in a corner,” he explains. “We don’t have many skills. We can’t have babies. The No. 1 reason women are different from men is that they’re able to have children. We don’t have anything left. And this barking produces a new kind of guy.”

Last Man Standing premieres Tuesday, Oct. 11. on ABC.

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