Home Improvement

In 1991 (the year after Robert Bly's Iron John was published) Home Improvement, starring comedian Tim Allen as Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, brought the complicated state of contemporary masculinity to prime-time television. While many TV families of the late 1980s and early 1990s featured single fathers (e.g., Who's the Boss, Empty Nest, Full House) and workplace settings (e.g., Cheers, Murphy Brown, Designing Women), [Page 216]Home Improvement thrust the middle-class WASP family back into the spotlight, challenging popular notions of ideal fatherhood and masculinity within the nuclear family. Whereas family shows of the 1950s, such as Father Knows Best, featured a flawless breadwinner and family man, Home Improvement introduced a father struggling to understand himself and his family; and whereas mastery of home improvement had typified the ideal suburban father, Tim Taylor is comically dangerprone. Until the program ended in 1999, Allen's trademark combination of hypermasculinity, testosterone, and power tools parlayed into a top-rated sitcom.

Living in Michigan with his outspoken wife Jill (Patricia Richardson) and three sons, Tim embodies characteristics often associated with crude masculinity: vulgarity, desire for unyielding power, and egocentrism. During each episode, however, his masquerade of manliness crumbles as his attempts to interact with his wife and children, or simply to accomplish tasks around the house turn disastrous through family squabbles or exploding appliances.

When Tim cannot recognize his own inadequacies, he seeks the wisdom of his Zen-like neighbor, Mr. Wilson (Earl Hindman), who advises Tim while enacting tribal or spiritual customs in his backyard. (Many reviewers have identified Wilson's actions with Robert Bly's emphasis on recapturing masculinity through a communal return to the primitive, but his uncontested inner peace and constant depiction as a loner distance him from the communal weekend warriors associated with Bly's faction of the men's movement.) Like Jill, Wilson attempts to make the egocentric Tim more aware of others' needs—to educate him in the “sensitive male” model of manhood—but Tim exhibits the weekly amnesia of most situation-comedy characters, repeatedly forgetting lessons that have already been learned.

Tim's style of masculinity is also scrutinized through juxtaposition with a “sensitive male” during his public performances on his do-it-yourself television show Tool Time. Playing a foil to Tim's tactless rube, his co-host and much-tortured sidekick Al Borland (Richard Karn) sports a stereotypically masculine flannel shirt and beard, but he personifies a softer model of manhood: emotional, aware of his feminine side, and respectful to women (especially his mother). As Tim's show objectifies women with sexy Tool Time Girls Lisa and Heidi (Pamela Anderson and Debbe Dunning) and promotes male power, his own bumbles and Al's higher level of competence and more “sensible” masculinity repeatedly undermine Tim's position.

Home Improvement offered a friendly critique of the men's movement while also providing variable representations of acceptable masculinity. Tim's constant struggle for a peaceful equilibrium between a preconceived notion of “real” masculine behavior and that encouraged by the feminist movement appealed to viewers, landing the show as high as number two in ratings during its eight-year run. While many shows of the 1990s sought to diverge from the nuclear family, Home Improvement reappropriated the white middle-class male for critique, destabilizing the notion of traditional manhood in favor of more conflicted masculinities.

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