Welcome Tim Allen back to the land of the multi-camera sitcom, for the third time in a form that has served him well. Home Improvement ran for eight seasons on ABC and arguably enabled him to become a movie star. “Last Man Standing,” which marked his return to television after a decade in theaters, ran for nine seasons in 2021 (six on ABC, three on Fox). And here he is again, again on ABC, with “Shifting.” Gears,” which premieres Wednesday and is expected to take Allen — a fit 71-year-old, his tight T-shirt would have you know — into the ’80s, if the past is foreplay.

Allen plays Matt, who – by importing Allen’s own automotive interests – runs a repair shop specializing in vintage and custom cars. (Working here is Daryl Mitchell as Stitch, a wisecracking prankster, and Seann William Scott as Gabriel, handsome, amiable, a little goofy.) Literally driving back into Matt’s life, in a dirty Pontiac GTO they bought him 15 years ago When he becomes pregnant with a musician friend, his daughter Riley (Kat Dennings) is with him. She’s getting a divorce, musicians being what they are, and needs a place to land with her two children, sophisticated teenager Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and cheerful little Georgia (Barrett Margolis), who has a soft spot for Inventor and “Shark Tank” panelist Lori has Greiner and dreams of becoming a billionaire. (The children are excellent.)

“Good luck finding a man who’s okay with his wife making more money than him,” says Matt, an old-fashioned guy.

“I don’t need a man to feel complete,” Georgia replies.

“If you want to kill a spider, a man will look damn good.”

“I have a shoe.”

Father and daughter have been more or less estranged since Riley’s mother died undetermined years ago – the children know their grandfather. She was the bridge that allowed them to have a relationship. Riley, a former wild child who was voted “mean without a reason” by her high school class, tries to raise her children with a sensitivity that Matt, who is “all “coddled in my day,” finds to be coddling looks at. And so they have to learn to get along under one roof. You get the picture.

Allen plays Matt, a widowed owner of a classic car restoration shop whose estranged daughter Riley (Dennings) and her children return to his life. Dennings, left, Maxwell Simkins, Barrett Margolis, Allen and Seann William Scott.

(Raymond Liu/Disney)

When Last Man Standing, in which Allen played a not-dissimilar character, debuted in 2011, we were in the third year of the first Obama administration, and a show with a decidedly conservative lead character played a little differently in the U.S. TV ecosystem ; Now, on the edge of heaven knows what, such a figure reads as something like a lovable, almost moderate curmudgeon. Matt reads the Wall Street Journal and rails against television pundits “who tell you what to think about the news, as if I’m too stupid to form my own angry opinion.” As Stitch, anticipating one of Matt’s rants, says, “Let me guess, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket,” Matt replies, “We don’t even make handbaskets in the US anymore.” We make up excuses, people quitting smoking and having diabetes, and Celebrities who use diabetes medication to lose weight.” He describes Gabriel’s dirty hat as “a regular hat that’s been left in Portland for too long.”

The tenor of such softball taunts may cause “Shifting Gears” to fall behind the times. There’s something dutiful about the show’s sociopolitical humor, such as it is, that serves more to give the characters something to lash out at than to say anything substantive about how we should live right now. And no one hits very hard; This is, after all, a show about loving difficult relationships and putting differences aside. (Riley: “Can we try talking to each other like sensible adults? Matt: “Have you seen the news lately? That’s not a thing anymore.”) Classic stuff.

Allen and Dennings quickly find a satisfying mix of hostility and affection. Both know their way around a sitcom filmed in front of a live audience. (Dennings spent six seasons on “2 Broke Girls.”) They talk very well about each other and don’t know exactly what to say. In a tender moment, side by side on a couch, unsure how to reach out, he touches her…foot. To the extent that there is a new Tim Allen here, it’s the one who almost cries when he thinks about his late wife and the flour sifter he didn’t clean. But his smug characters have always had a soft core. (And who really needs a new Tim Allen?)

“It was really different just here,” he tells Riley. “I think that’s why I watch the news in the morning, so I can hear a woman’s voice — even if sometimes it’s Nancy Pelosi.”

“Yes, it’s annoying how she’s trying to save democracy.”

The series was created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker Scully, “Simpsons” writers and co-creators of the animated series “Duncanville” starring Amy Poehler. They reportedly left after the pilot episode (directed by John Pasquin, who directed about a fifth of the “Home Improvement” and more than a third of the “Last Man Standing” episodes), which may be why the second one Only two episodes were shown – feels less focused.

The fact that there is nothing new to see here is not a disadvantage of the series. Political differences between close-knit sitcom families date back at least to “All in the Family,” which had been off the air for nearly a decade when Dennings was born; Adult children moving in with their parents, or parents moving in with children (see “Lopez vs. Lopez,” currently in its third season on NBC) is an old theme in television that loves to cram as many generations as possible into a three-walled space Set to pack. Formulas are formulas because they produce consistent, reliable, and unsurprising results.