Why 'Home Improvement' Star Is Not Interested in a Series Reboot
The past decade has seen dozens of reboots and revivals of beloved '80s and '90s series, from Fuller House and The Conners to That '90s Show and so on. But despite his best efforts, Tim Allen has never managed to bring back his classic ABC sitcom Home Improvement. So when Allen said in an interview last year that he was still in talks with the core cast to revive the series, apparently this came as a surprise to Patricia Richardson, who played matriarch Jill Taylor.
During an appearance on the Back to the Best podcast last week, Richardson shot down the notion that she or her TV sons, played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Zachery Ty Bryan, and Taran Noah Smith, had anything to do with an alleged reboot.
"I would hear on Twitter or whatever that he was coming out publicly and saying this stuff about how everyone was on board to do a Home Improvement reunion," Richardson said, when asked if she would ever consider a reboot. "But he never asked me, and he never asked Jonathan, who I talk to. So, I called Jonathan one day and said, 'Has he asked you about this?' And he went, ‘No.' And 'Why's he going around telling everybody that we're all on board when he hasn’t talked to you or me?'"
Richardson then said that she had heard rumors that there was a script being passed around for a spinoff involving her character, which she also vehemently denied—as she likewise did on social media late last year.
"And he was kind of lying to people and telling them that I was on board, and I didn't know anything about it," she continued. "So, I wrote a big thing on Twitter and just said, 'I'm not involved in any kind of series with Jill, and I've also never even been asked to do another Home Improvement reunion thing.' But I would not want to."
"I mean, Zach is now a felon," she said, referring to the 42-year-old's various legal issues; most recently, his fourth DUI charge earlier this year. "Taran hasn’t acted since he left the show. He's not an actor anymore. And Jonathan's not really interested in acting. He wants to direct and write. And we don’t have Wilson."
Earl Hindman, who played next-door neighbor Wilson, died from lung cancer more than 20 years ago in December 2003.
"So if they did it without Earl and we have just two kids, probably, if that, it's not going to be the same—it's not gonna be the show, at all," Richardson explained. "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, and we've all changed quite a bit, I think, since then... It would be very weird."
"I think we did it well, we quit at the right time, before it got really bad, and it should just stay like it is," she added.
Richardson has reunited onscreen with Allen since Home Improvement ended its eight-season run in 1999, most recently on his sitcom Last Man Standing in 2016 alongside Taylor Thomas, who also made a cameo as her character's son. But it seems that nearly a decade later, there is no love lost between the former co-stars.