The Shifting Gears actor also reveals the one person who always stood up for him, not realizing how much the late producer had his back until after his death.
On his new show Shifting Gears, Tim Allen plays a grandfather who learns a thing or two about Millennials and Gen Z after his estranged daughter and her kids move back home.
It’s a role to which the Home Improvement alum, dad to 35-year-old and 15-year-old daughters in real life, can relate.
While his character gets educated on pronouns, anxiety and other issues by on-screen daughter Kat Dennings and her children on the ABC sitcom — premiering January 8 — its texting acronyms that really throws Allen off in his everyday world.
“What I am completely oblivious to is texting,” Allen told TooFab when asked whether there was anything his kids have had to teach him over the years, adding that while he’s “pretty good” when it comes to sending messages over his phone, it’s messages like LMAO — or “LAMOU,” as he put it — that send him for a loop.
“The abbreviations [are] like what we used to call Pig Latin when I was in elementary and high school,” he said, “and all the girls had this language and I never got that.”
“There’s a couple text strings my daughters have given me and I’ve really– I think they’re messing with me,” said Allen with a laugh.
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Continuing to drive home the generational divide, Allen then shared a story about one of his daughters while working on his previous sitcom, Last Man Standing.
“I told one of the girls, I said, ‘I got this new device that you poke in numbers and then the other person’s voice pops up.’ They go, ‘What?! What is that?'” he explained, before deadpanning, “I go, ‘It’s called a telephone.”
“When someone said streaming is a lot easier because you can record what you want, I said, ‘Does anyone remember a thing called TiVo?’ We used to have a television that did it all by itself, I didn’t have to press boxes and sign in. You could find whatever you wanted, schedule to see it, go back into the recording box and watch it,” he added. “I’m not sure what we’re doing now … my kids don’t like calling people. Texting and talking are not the same. I tried to do jokes on X and I fail more than I get, you lose something.”
As mentioned above, Allen stars on Switching Gears as a dad who gives his adult daughter and her kids somewhere to crash after a breakup. It’s a much-needed lifeline for Dennings’ character.
While speaking with the 71-year-old actor, we wondered whether he could pinpoint a moment in his career where someone stuck their neck out for him, or did him a solid when he really needed it. For Allen, he almost immediately thought of his late producing partner Brian Reilly, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
“I have a producing partner of mine, who’s been nothing but my best friend, and I think about him all the time. He passed away suddenly from pancreatic cancer and I never really got how he stood up for me until he passed away and I never stopped thinking about him,” Allen revealed.
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He explained that their working relationship — which included partnerships on the Santa Clause films — got to a point where it was “not working” anymore and he let Reilly go, without much of a heads up anything was even wrong.
“I one day said, ‘This isn’t working for me,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘Why didn’t you let me know this ahead of [time]?'” Allen recalled. “And I go, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t do that.'”
“We never became not friends, we were still close friends after that, and then I realized how much he stood up for me after the fact,” he continued. “He came to the hospital when I got into a racing car accident and he was the first guy at the hospital, brought by a movie and something to eat. And I said, ‘Man, this guy, I totally screwed this one up.'”
But as it turns out, he didn’t, with Allen sharing that Reilly told him, “I’m not pissed, you don’t want to work with me and that’s fine, but I still want to be your friend.”
“What a great guy,” Allen said.
Switching Gears kicks off January 8 on ABC.