“You’re Taking Apart Our Dryer?” “I’m Taking Apart Our Dryer for You.”
I hadn’t intended to take so long between seasons of Home Improvement. I have them all on DVD, so I have no excuse. But I finally sat down and watch season seven of this classic 90’s sitcom.
There is little new in this season of the show. It still stars Tim Allen as Tim Taylor, the star of the local TV show Tool Time, where he and his assistant Al (Richard Karn) show how to do home improvement products. Scratch that – they should how NOT to do products since Tim’s insistence on more power often creates disasters.
On the home front, Tim’s wife Jill (Patricia Richardson) is finishing up her masters in psychology. Oldest son Brad (Zachery Ty Bryan) is getting over being dumped by his girlfriend. Middle son Randy (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) continues with his job for the school newspaper and gets his driver’s license. Meanwhile, the youngest son, Mark (Taran Noah Smith) enters his goth phase. And next door, Wilson (Earl Hindman) continues to offer advice. His niece, Willow (recurring guest star China Kantner) also decides to move in.
What else happens in these twenty-five episodes? Tim decides to buy a lodge on a lake for the family to move to. A college is interested in offering Brad a soccer scholarship. Tim finds some pot hidden in his yard. Meanwhile, he buys a house as an investment and Al becomes his tenant. The family goes to the Lion’s game for Thanksgiving. And it’s brother against brother when Brad’s puff column pumps Randy’s investigative piece off the front page of the school paper.
My biggest problem with the series remains – Tim really is an idiot. I know, I know, that’s the premise of the series, and I enjoy it in small doses. But it wears on me when, episode after episode, he makes some pretty basic mistakes.
On the other hand, the writers do a good job of throwing stories around this season. It helps that the boys are now grown enough to handle being the focus of an episode. I appreciate it when we get to see Tim and Jill working together on an issue they are facing raising their sons. Tim’s actually less of an idiot in those episodes than in earlier seasons, which I like.
I do appreciate that, at the end of the episode, the characters have resolved their issues and hopefully grown a little as a result. Okay, they probably haven’t grown too much since this is 90’s TV where characters didn’t change that much from week to week. Watching these episodes back to back, we don’t see huge continuity errors, but there is very little growth, either. But that’s okay; that was TV in that era.
The cast all knows their characters at this point, and they do a good job of bringing them to life each week, milking every joke they can from the script.
And I truly appreciate the pacing of the comedy in these episodes compared to the sitcoms of today. Not every line is a joke. Or a set up. Sometimes, the lines are just there to tell the story. It’s the rare episode that goes too long between jokes (there are a couple of special episodes), but they don’t force in laughs for the sake of laughs. They still work on giving us a good mix of laughs and story to keep us entertained. (Today’s sitcoms feel like they try to make every line a laugh line, and it wears. But that’s a conversation for another review.)
As I said earlier, season seven consisted of twenty-five episodes. Each of them is preserved here in this three disc set. They are in full frame and stereo since that is how they were originally broadcast. In the way of extras, we get an extended gag reel with mostly outtakes we hadn’t seen during the closing credits.
While this may not be one of my top sitcoms, it does still make me laugh. For that reason, I’m glad I made it back for season seven of Home Improvement.
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