Disgruntled Last Man Standing fans, rejoice! Fox has picked up the defunct Tim Allen series, and it’ll start up right where it left off: Season 7.
The show is already a part of Fox’s upcoming weekly lineup on Fridays, and the TV studio has released a trailer. Allen posted the news on his personal Twitter account.
“Team LMS was in the sixth inning, ahead by four runs, stands were packed and then for no reason, they call off the game. It leaves you sitting in the dugout, holding a bat and puzzled. Now we get the news from FOX that it’s time to get back out on that diamond — hell yes, I’m excited,” said Allen in a statement announcing the revival.
Indeed, Allen couldn’t hold back his excitement.
“When I heard the offer to create more episodes of Last Man Standing, I did a fist pump so hard I threw my back out,” he continued in the statement, released Friday. “It’s the fans! I could not be more grateful for the fans who wrote petitions and kept up the passion and incredible support for the show.”
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Last Man Standing was ABC’s No. 2 comedy on its original run, and Fox said that it made the call to resurrect the series after it axed several of its comedy series, including Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Mick.
Many critics and TV experts say that the real reason Fox brought Last Man Standing back was because of the success of Roseanne, another show that tends to lean to the right.
Called the “perfect sitcom for the Donald Trump era,” Last Man Standing was one of the only shows on TV featuring a right-wing/conservative point of view, and some believe that this may have been the reason for its cancellation, since its ratings were decent throughout its run. It was canned more than a year ago.
Allen, for his part, has been very outspoken on talk shows and in public. He is not shy about his conservative views, but has claimed in the past that you have to “be careful” when expressing unpopular opinions, especially during prime time.
Last spring, he told Jimmy Kimmel that “you get beat up if don’t believe what everybody believes.”
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Things have changed on the TV landscape since then, with conservative-leaning Roseanne absolutely dominating the ratings in North America; the family sitcom shocked the TV industry when it premiered in March to a mind-blowing 18.4 million viewers in the U.S. — a number hardly seen anymore in the age of streaming. (For comparison, worldwide hit This Is Us averages nine million viewers per episode.)
Last week, Allen fueled the revival speculation fire by tweeting to Last Man Standing fans.
The sitcom was doing fairly well over its first five seasons, but in its sixth, it started to see a very slight dip in ratings. All things considered, it was still doing quite well against its competitors. A specific reason for the cancellation wasn’t provided by ABC at the time, but both financial and “show substance” theories have been floated. CMT was in talks to bring the show back, as it did with country-music series Nashville, but eventually, monetary costs ended those conversations.
The series originally aired on CMT in Canada before its cancellation; as of this writing, it’s unclear where Canadians can watch the revival (other than Fox).
(You can watch the teaser trailer, top.)
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