We have been hoping to save our unique picture shoot of the Home Improvement forged for our Reunions Issue on newsstands Oct. 7, but someone let the cat out of the bag via Twitter (we’re lookin’ at you, Patricia Richardson!), so we decided to offer followers a sneak peek of the reunion held last month in Pacific Palisades, Calif.
Following her role on Home Improvement, Patricia Richardson went on to star within the medical drama Strong Medicine until 2005. She also had a recurring position on The West Wing as marketing campaign supervisor Sheila Brooks. More not too long ago, Richardson appeared within the crime drama County Line, alongside Jeff Fahey and Tom Wopat. Of all the Home Improvement stars, Richardson seems to be probably the most like her on-display persona. Jill all the time had a trademark haircut with bangs—a haircut Richardson nonetheless sports activities an up to date version of at present.
Still, inventiveness and high quality aren’t all the time factors in nostalgia; as seen in Fuller House , usually the opposite is true. And they clearly didn’t factor into the success of Home Improvement’s unique, 1991-ninety nine run both, when the present spent the last decade in the Nielsen Top 10 , even taking the honor of most-watched sitcom—over Seinfeld and Roseanne—in its second and third seasons. While by no means a important darling, it nonetheless nabbed quite a number of Emmy nominations, including two for Outstanding Comedy Series and four for Richardson. Its popularity was such that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton even seriously thought of a visitor-starring function , believing it may help her higher assimilate amongst humans. Even at its end, Home Improvement remained such a juggernaut that Allen and Richardson have been supplied $50 million and $25 million, respectively, to keep it going for a ninth season, which they politely declined.
Perhaps most crucially, Home Improvement has not been afforded the faintly damning courtesy of becoming retro kitsch. The Taylors have not been dragged, grayer and puffier, into any Old Navy advertisements; the closest we have come is Richard Karn doing infomercials for one thing known as the Pocket Hose You additionally won’t find Karn’s face smirking, I don’t assume so, Tim ” among the racks of Sandlot and Kelly Kapowski shirts at Urban Outfitters, nor see the show reimagined as an eight-bit recreation. (Though Nintendo’s legendarily shitty Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! could have made that a moot level.) Even within the rock-bottom phrases of what should be a meme, Home Improvement has had relatively minor traction: The hottest of these is way and away the Grunt Replacement,” where every sound in a video game is changed with Allen’s primal expression of manly confusion.
And maybe, simply as it’s for Allen, the fact that Last Man Standing exists means there is no real point in anyone eager for Home Improvement at all, so completely does it fill that area of interest. The present has even provided a de facto reunion within the form of an episode the place Richardson guested as Allen’s neighbor And that followed numerous on-and-off-screen encounters between Allen and his estranged TV son Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who’s appeared in a number of Last Man Standing episodes and even directed a couple of. Their reconciliation ended a protracted-operating feud that erupted over Thomas’ choice to leave Home Improvement in its eighth season and focus on attending college, even declining to appear in its sequence finale.