Culture
Patricia Richardson Spent Eight Years Arguing Tim Taylor Should Face Consequences Then Faced Them Herself
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
In a development that reframes an entire decade of American television, Taran Noah Smith, who played the youngest Taylor child on Home Improvement from 1991 to 1999 and has since had twenty-five years to think about it, has come forward to explain why Patricia Richardson left one of the most watched sitcoms in ABC history.
The short version, per Smith: she got tired.
The longer version, which is the interesting one, is that Richardson spent the better part of a decade in what Smith describes as an ongoing creative negotiation with the show's writing staff, arguing, apparently with considerable passion and diminishing returns, that Jill Taylor should behave like a person who exists in physical reality. The writers, cycling in with fresh enthusiasm and no particular attachment to the show's original tone, preferred a different approach, which was more of Tim Allen falling off things.
This is, when you sit with it, a genuinely extraordinary piece of television history. Home Improvement was a show whose central premise was a man who could not operate machinery without causing structural damage to his home, his neighborhood, and once, memorably, a local bridge. It ran for eight seasons. It was watched by thirty million people a week. And somewhere inside that operation, for all eight of those seasons, Patricia Richardson was raising her hand in a writers' room and saying, "but would Jill actually do that," and the room was saying, "Tim's going to try to fix the garage door with a jet engine," and Richardson was saying, "yes but what does Jill feel about that," and the room was already writing the jet engine.
Richardson, who was nominated for four Emmy Awards for this performance that she was simultaneously fighting to keep coherent, has not commented directly on Smith's account. She does not need to. The Emmys are sitting there. The show ran eight seasons. She left before the ninth, which did not happen, because there was no ninth, because she left.
Smith, speaking with the calm authority of a man who was nine years old when the show began and has had a great deal of time since then to process the experience, described Richardson as someone who cared enormously about the integrity of the material. This is an extremely generous way of saying she was the only person in the building asking whether any of this made sense.
Tim Allen, who played Tim Taylor, the man whose approach to home improvement was to add more power to whatever was already broken, has not been quoted in any recent reporting on this subject. His memoir, however, is called "Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man," which suggests he and Richardson may simply have had different relationships with the concept of consequences.
The real revelation here is not that a talented actress grew exhausted fighting a losing institutional battle. That is every workplace in America and several in Canada. The revelation is that Home Improvement, a show about a large man who did not understand tools, had a realism standard, and it was maintained by exactly one person, for eight years, alone, against the tide, until she walked out the door.
Jill Taylor would have understood completely.
Tim Taylor would have tried to fix it with a compressor.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/home-improvement-star-says-patricia-richardson-got-tired-fighting-sitcom