‘Last Man Standing’ Reintroduces Vanessa Baxter With Wink at Politics

Last Man Standing‘s Vanessa Baxter is officially being dubbed a “referee mom” in the newest teaser for season seven.

The former ABC, now Fox comedy series is heavily promoting the show’s revival season, and posted a new video on social media putting the spotlight on the Baxter family patriarch, playing Nancy Travis.

In the quick clip, Vanessa is first seen blowing a whistle so her family stops talking.

“That’s it!” she says. For the rest of this visit there will be no more political discussion.”

“Perfect,” Mike (Tim Allen) says. “Til you leave, Eve, nobody talks politics but me.”

Again, Vanessa blows her whistle and gives Mike a menacing look.

“Not you either,” she tells her husband.

“What happened to Free Speech?” he responds as the video ends. “When did we become UC Berkeley?”

The beloved sitcom, which was surprisingly canceled after its sixth season by ABC back in 2017, has been making headlines ahead of its anticipated return this week.

The show surprised fans on Sunday when it dropped the first episode of season seven online, titled “Welcome Baxter”.

During the episode, the cast quickly references the ABC cancellation in its opening moments as Kyle (Christoph Sanders) and Vanessa talk about the hardships of the TV business.

Despite the funny reference to it in the premiere, Allen recently opened up in an interview about feeling blindsided by the end of his show the first time around.

“I’ve had sudden deaths in my family and, for some strange reason, it reminded me of that, where you had no warning,” he said in an interview with Parade recently. “Everything was going quite well. It seemed like the network was very happy with us and we were doing our job [ratings-wise] on the night as required.”

The actor reminisced about how he immediately lashed out at ABC at the time, as he felt the series had been unjustly taken off the air.

“It just didn’t feel like the patient had died,” he said of LMS. “That’s what I kept saying to people. To use an odd metaphor, I said, ‘I kept a pulse going, I kept checking in on the hospital room. I sat by the bedside.’ I thought, This is still an interesting show to me, because it was just funny.”

Cancellation drama aside, fans of the series will be excited to see the Baxter family return, with a few changes but the same heart. Last Man Standing returns Friday at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.