Tim Allen is revealing the reason he says the Home Improvement reboot is “stuck.”
During an interview with Us Weekly, the actor was asked for an update after sharing his hopes in recent years for a potential spinoff of the 1990s sitcom.
“They keep talking about how it could move forward, but they get stuck [because] there are some personality problems right now with the boys,” Allen said, referring to the actors who played his onscreen sons in the show, Zachery Ty Bryan, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Taran Noah Smith.
“They’ve got their own issues,” the Toy Story voice actor added. “I always thought it would be cool if it was a story about them. That’s a little challenging right now, to put it mildly.”
Home Improvement, which ran for eight seasons from 1991 to 1999, followed Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor (Allen), an accident-prone television host raising three mischievous boys — Brad (Bryan), Randy (Thomas) and Mark (Smith) — with his wife (Patricia Richardson), co-host (Richard Karn) and eccentric neighbor (Earl Hindman).
Since the show concluded, Bryan has found himself in trouble with the law multiple times and is currently serving a 16-month sentence in California for a felony DUI conviction. That will be followed by a 19-month prison sentence in Oregon for probation violations related to a 2023 domestic violence conviction. He was also arrested in 2020 for allegedly strangling his then-girlfriend, Johnny Faye Cartwright.
As for Smith and Thomas, Richardson previously said on the Back to the Best podcast that the former is “not an actor anymore” (Smith’s last credit was in 1999’s Batman Beyond) and the latter is “not really interested in acting. He wants to direct and write.”
“It’s not going to be the show at all, and people think we can just magically go right back to who we were 30 years ago and do a show that was 30 years ago,” Richardson said of a potential reboot. “We’ve all changed quite a bit, I think, since then, and the show would just be very weird.”