TV Review - Family Tools

As a kid growing up in the nineties, I loved sitcoms, and I still do. I watched sooo many sitcoms. I got the trailing edge of the eighties coms, and I got to see the beginnings of the greatest sitcoms of the nineties and the early millennium, several of which set the stage for the sitcoms of today. I watched Friends when it was new. Before that, sex was usually talked about as if it were a PSA, and characters were almost always related, or at the very least living under a single roof, or going to the same school. Restaurant scenes were pretty rare. Friends changed everything, and ever since, everyone has been trying to change things just as much. While I admire this, I miss the classic sitcom. I miss The Cosby Show, Family Matters, and Saved by the Bell. I even miss Full House, though it pains me to say it. Most of all, though, I miss Home Improvement.


I've always been a huge Tim Allen fan. Hell, I even like his bad stuff, and I mean the really bad stuff. This is probably Home Improvement's fault. Back in the days of Video Cassettes my dad would constantly set the VCR (I know, I know, what's a VCR, but seriously, stick with me here) to record every episode of Home Improvement and we'd all watch together again and again, me, my dad, and everyone else in the family. And I ate it up. There was just something about that show. You had slapstick for the kids, mature jokes and themes for the adults, funny sounds, power tools, sarcasm, and even some family friendly drama that managed to be pretty touching from time to time. Love Tim Allen or hate him, it was a great show. In fact, as a ridiculously sarcastic person, I often attribute my humor to certain characters on this show. If you get the chance, check it out.

So obviously, when I heard that a new show with a tool theme was going to start airing, I got UBER excited (note that that uber is in all caps). I guess I was spoiled by Home Improvement, because this show that I knew nothing about, which airs Wednesdays on ABC, btw, was already holding up some lofty expectations, but even so, when I saw it, I was underwhelmed. I'll admit, many of the "modern" sitcoms that everyone love so much just don't do it for me, so maybe I missed something, but still, bear with me as I try to express why.

First, I want to discuss another sitcom that I absolutely love. I know, I know, I'm going off on way too many tangents, but again, bear with me. This will matter, I promise. Anyway, the sitcom I want to discuss next, very briefly if I can manage it, is the masterpiece of humor that is Arrested Development. Everyone has heard of this show. It was relatively short lived in TV, but built a cult following near the end of its run and later, after its cancellation, got a movie, and then uncancelled by my favorite thing forever and ever, Netflix.com. Now there is a new season on its way as well as a movie, and I couldn't be happier, because this show killed. Like Friends, it redefined the genre. Now we have sitcoms with weird, quirky, and often unlikeable, and overall more realistic and gritty, characters. They are less idealized than the sitcom characters who came before, though the situations that they find themselves in are rarely as down to earth as they themselves often are. Did I expect Family Tools to share aspects of this? Yes, but, well, let's put it this way: Family Tools didn't try to copy Arrested Development, but it seemed like it was trying way too hard to invoke its memory, and everything else just felt lazy.

Let's talk about my first point of contention with this show: the title. It's called Family Tools. Can anyone guess what it's about? If you said a family with a tool business, you're correct. If you're one of those people who desperately guessed something else because you didn't think the writers would be so direct, then you get to hang out over here with me in Wrongtown. Yeah, shows can get away with simply telling us what they're about in the title, but you've gotta be more creative than just shortening Family Tool Business to two words. It's boring. But a title doth not a series make. The real reason I didn't like this show was all of the other boring stuff in the pilot episode.

Family Tools is a show about a family with a tool business, as I've said before. The pilot began with the owner of this tool business having a heart attack, and not his first. No warning, no buildup, just guy on the ground having a (very unconvincing) heart attack while his annoying sister, the wife from King of Queens who I should probably find less attractive than I do, refuses to let the EMT's in to save him until he agrees to retire. The scene drags on with the two of them arguing about who he could possibly give the reigns of his company to. Could it be, yes, yes, it's his estranged son who he doesn't get along with.

Imagine that.

What we get next is a scene of his son, who has got to be the smiliest guy on Earth, rushing back home to his father, having received a text from him saying "I need you", something which has apparently never occurred before. No mention of the heart attack, either, mind you. This was obviously supposed to be a gag, but it was just forced and wasn't funny. All I could think throughout the scene was "why is he running back to this jerk if he doesn't even think the guy is dying?"

Anyway, he finally arrives in town, we get some scenes telling us about all of the ridiculously amazing things that this guy has done to (unsuccessfully) impress his dad. I mean amazing. But in typical cliché fashion, none of it was enough. Yeah right. And to make it worse, we find out once the son finally reaches the hospital that his dad didn't even send the text, the aunt did. If it was so easy for her to get the guy to come back to town, why didn't she just do that the first time she had an inkling that her brother's health was failing? Why wait until he was in critical condition? I guess this was supposed to make her seem manipulative and therefore fun, but again, it just left me confused.

From here we are mostly just introduced to character after character, from the crazy, quirky neighbor, to the assistant in the business, to the sister of the assistant who also works for this supposed family business, to our man characters weird nephew who is all too obviously meant to resemble George-Michael Bluth, Michael Cera's character on Arrested Development. In fact many things were obviously meant to resemble the aforementioned series, from the simple tittle, to the cast of weirdoes surrounding the one normal guy (the son), to the very setup of the father being removed against his will from the situation, forcing his son to step up into his place. Even the intro was a cheap rip-off of the Arrested Development intro. Where Arrested Development did this things so, so well, this show just didn't. Is there an interesting setup here? Sure. It could work. It just wasn't executed well here. The jokes, the dialogue, even the half-assed moral thrown in at the end, all felt way too forced. Dramatic moments, odd character details, and even whole characters who we're supposed to care about come out of nowhere with absolutely no buildup whatsoever.

Notice that I haven't been using the names of these characters in this review. That's because not a single one of them made enough of a positive impression on me for me to remember. The assistant, the obvious primary comic foil to the son, was just annoying. His sister, the (I guess) love interest, was literally the only person in the cast who's dialogue made me chuckle at all. Not that the delivery was bad, the jokes just weren't funny.

Overall this show was just a mess. It had twenty-two minutes to create an identity for itself, and it failed. It tried too hard, and it borrowed too much. Not to say that borrowing from other shows is bad, if done well. This show, so far, is an example of how not to borrow from other shows. It just wasn't done well. Does this show have potential? Yeah. Anything that borrows so much from Arrested Development, one of the funniest things ever, must have the potential to be funny on its own. Hell, make it a straight up AD clone, as long as it's funny. This just wasn't funny.

While I hope that this show finds itself later down the line and improves, and while I'll keep track of it for a while on the off chance that it will, for now I can't give Family Tools more than a 4 out of 10.