Every year, network television producers have a challenge laid before them: to break new ground on sitcoms with the same tired Tim Allens and former Roseanne kids.
One way is to go with the familiar, but add a twist. For instance: Yes Dear was your average white family sitcom, only with another wrong-kind-of-white family living in Will and Carlton’s pool house out back. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills and not every channel can be HB-goddamn-O.
But, then, every so often, a producer finds a goal—nay, a mission to champion and the talent to pull it off. A show like Will & Grace, which dared to ask, “What if we made a show about gay people and only one acts like a cartoon?” Or Cheers, which looked at alcoholism and thought, “What’s the big deal, anyway?” A show that tackles the concerns of the average American with a no-holds-barred approach the way Major Dad did with newly remarried divorcées and the Marines.
Fortunately for ABC, Tim Allen has heard your pleas and plans to do what Designing Women did for women, only this time for men.
In the upcoming fall sitcom, Last Man Standing, Tim Allen stretches his acting chops by playing a character not named Tim who becomes a stay-at-home dad to his three daughters when his wife returns to work. Like every stay-at-home dad, “Mike” leaves home every day to work at an outdoor adventure firm in a world where 50 percent of the workplace and 60 percent of college graduates suddenly reflects the ratio of women to men in the world.
Last Man Standing is a show with the manscaped balls to ask, with women achieving roughly the same amount as men for less pay, how are men to change a tire or load a gun? The answer according to show creator Jack Burditt: they can’t because of girls or something.
And, although it may be called Last Man Standing, it’s certainly not the Last Show Standing. ABC is also giving us Man Up, which asks the tough questions like what are men now that women write television shows. Work It follows three men who finally defeat the inherent reverse sexism of Equal Employment Opportunity by dressing as women to get jobs.
Finally, television gets it.
With women all making the workplace smell like Bath and Bodyworks or Hermione Grangering up our college lecture halls, is it any wonder that men can’t catch a break anymore? They’ve turned our vampires and werewolves into hairless Gap models when they used to be Hungarians in silky capes and Michael Landon. Universities have even stopped carrying male-friendly degree programs like TV/VCR repair and gun-smithing to keep up with shrinking penis numbers.
We need ABC to hold up a mirror to America–and not one of those floor-length mirrors that shows us which shoes match this Bulls jersey–before this gets out of hand, and men are simply no more. And we can’t allow that to happen; otherwise, we’ll have to make shows about lesbians. And that’s just plain immoral if they’re not sixes or above.