DVD Review: Home Improvement Season 7
Note: From time to time, I write media reviews for Infuze Magazine. Here is the most recent.
“Home Improvement” ran on ABC for a few good seasons and, years later, finally went off the air. By the time the show reached its seventh season it had not only jumped the shark, it had jumped the entire ocean.
When the program debuted in 1991, the comedy focused on the klutzy antics of Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, his prickly, if ultimately warm, relationship with his assistant Al Borland, and domestic problems as he and wife Jill attempted to bridge the gender gap and raise three young boys.
From the beginning, the show was wholesome. As the seasons dragged on and changes were made to the program’s creative team, the show became more self-consciously “family entertainment.” Under the continuing influence of the network’s parent company, the Walt Disney Corporation, the show began to take on more of the qualities that have marked much of Disney’s output in recent years: heavy-handed secular moralism and a tendency to pander to suburban families with lowbrow comedy designed to keep kids laughing and parents spending.
Rather than focusing on the realistic, day-to-day conflicts of family and professional life, many storylines in this season celebrate the ridiculous and clownish. There’s the episode where Tim almost goes into outer space. There’s the one where he ends up in a long dream sequence doing a parody of the X-Files. Enough already.
Unlike previous successes in the domestic sit-com genre—The Cosby Show, for example—Home Improvement always relied on insult humor. The juxtaposition of the especially manly husband and father with a wife and kids willing to bring his ego down to size made for a few good laughs.
By season seven, however, the boys have mostly grown up, but the jokes have not. Again and again, the three young actors who play the Taylor boys deliver lines intended as clever zingers that instead emit a nearly audible thunk as they crash on the floor of the set. In part this is because, as children, the boys were chosen for their cuteness and the chemistry they had with the lead actors. As they grew and their personalities took shape, that chemistry was lost, and their dearth of acting talent became painfully obvious.
The apparent strategy for dealing with these failings was to up the laugh track. The show’s producers seemed to assume that if the jokes couldn’t make us laugh, maybe hinting that everyone else was doing it would. Laugh tracks work best when they are hardly noticed. Here, the cackling of the supposed audience is so obnoxious as to mar every episode with distracting noise.
Even such an invasive technique could have been overlooked if the viewer didn’t have a sense that such laughter was undeserved. What humor there is seems stiff and forced, like even the actors had long since stopped believing in the product.
It’s not that there are no genuine laughs in the season’s 25 episodes. The season’s best episodes, like the one where Tim accompanies Al to a singles bar to help his portly assistant meet women, offer a few. But be forewarned: if you are considering wading through this season, expect to encounter a program that had, by this time, fallen into serious disrepair.
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