Tim Allen Reveals Why ‘Home Improvement’ Revival Will Not Happen Right Now

After Tim Allen‘s Last Man Standing was cancelled, questions about a Home Improvement revival sprung up. But Home Improvement is now on the back burner and Allen has a perfectly good explanation for it: he can’t have two fictional wives and two fictional families at the same time.

In an interview with Parade Magazine, Allen admitted he was interested in doing a Home Improvement revival because he is still in contact with many of his co-stars.

“There were two revivals that were very, very interesting to me. One was Home Improvement, because I see the boys and Richard Karn all the time, and Debbe Dunning — everybody other than my dear friend Earl Hindman are around,” Allen explained. “It would be very easy to reboot that family because the boys live in town. They have children. Patricia [Richardson] and I have houses. But it gets a little creepy if you do it at the same time as I have another wife on another show. The timing is not good right now.”

Allen also believes his Home Improvement character Tim Taylor might not have aged that well. It would be difficult to go back to playing the “cartoony” character in 2018, especially after playing Last Man Standing‘s Mike Baxter.

“The question that always comes up is, Are Tim Taylor’s antics relevant right now? Because it was a little cartoony in the way he blew himself up all the time,” Allen told Parade. “Then Mike Baxter is a natural evolution of that guy’s guy. Although with Tim Taylor, you never knew whether he was really smart or really stupid. I thought he was real smart; he knew that it came across sometimes that he wasn’t very bright. Baxter’s not that way.”

Before Fox revived Last Man Standing in May, Allen was open to the idea of a Home Improvement revival, but sounded more interested in bringing back Last Man Standing first.

“I can’t say everybody, but it has been floated,” Allen told Entertainment Tonight in March of a Home Improvement revival. “And more than I would have expected said, ‘Yeah, that would be cool to do it years later,’ like Roseanne.”

Richard Karn, who played Al Borland, told Closer Weekly in April he “just talked” to Allen about a revival and said he thought Patricia Richardson and the actors who played Tim’s sons “would be on board.”

Home Improvement originally ran on ABC from 1991 to 1999 and was one of the most-watched sitcoms of the 1990s. Allen starred as Tim Taylor, with Richardson as his wife and Zachery Ty Bryan, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Taran Noah Smith as his sons. The late Earl Hindman played Tim’s neighbor. Richardson, Karn and Thomas have both made appearances in Last Man Standing episodes.

Last Man Standing returns on Fox on Friday, Sept. 28.

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