Life Goes On for the Empty-Nesters

“We’re really a family here” is one of those quaint cliches that sitcom stars like to haul out when their long-running series are about to shut down and the public is expecting some end-of-an-era pathos. Interviewed in his office on the Disney lot five days before he would tape the last episode of “Home Improvement,” his longtime ABC sitcom, Tim Allen hit his mark--the gang at “Home” was indeed like a family, he said.

But then Allen kept going.

“This gets to a lot stuff that is none of your business, but as I’ve grown in this thing, and made some major changes in my life, I have not connected well with people. I’m a comedian because I can connect on a broad scale but not one-on-one. I’m not very comfortable with people. This is the only support I’ve ever really had, this family here. They seem to love me unconditionally--I was just writing in my diary about this. And once again it’s leaving me. Things with unconditional love in my life somehow disappear.”

On May 25, “Home Improvement,” that terminally unhip but hugely popular show, ends its eight-year run with a 90-minute finale, but closure was a bit harder to come by for the show’s star, who had to choke back tears before the grand finale began rolling.

For some, including co-star Patricia Richardson, who plays Tim’s better half Jill Taylor, the end of “Home Improvement” was arriving with sadness but also a belief that the show had run its course creatively.

For Allen, though, the end foreshadowed something else, something he hates: change. Change in both his personal and professional life. The end of the road for Tim Taylor, and the beginning of the road for . . . well, whom?

To make the transition from sitcom star to funnyman-at-large as smooth as possible, Allen, 45, began his post-”Home Improvement” life not on vacation but on the set of a movie, “Galaxy Quest,” a science-fiction comedy-drama in which he co-stars with Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman.

Funnyman-at-large was Allen’s status nearly a decade ago, when television producer Matt Williams took Allen’s chest-beating stand-up comedy voice, toned down the nightclub rhetoric, left in the relationship to power tools and turned out a family comedy that became enormously appealing to the masses. The sitcom presented a Midwestern idyll that reflected Allen’s signature comedy and Williams’ Indiana background, a heartland America of mother and father and 2.3 kids (the Taylors had three), and neighborly neighbors embodied by Wilson (Earl Hindman), who acted as Tim’s confidant and sage, his face obscured by the fence dividing their properties.

In the process, Allen, who in a former life had served time for selling cocaine, became a latter-day father figure--flawed and a bit sexist but good-natured about it all, safe enough even to be Santa Claus, as the comedian proved in his 1994 movie “The Santa Clause.”

Behind the scenes, Allen worked at adjusting to this new image, which made quitting it cold turkey eight years later that much more unnerving.

“Now I get a letter, I’ve gotta vacate by Wednesday,” Allen lamented, munching on a strict, pre-”Galaxy Quest” diet of chicken in his Disney office. “Outta here! After eight years. I’ve lived here, I’ve slept here, I’ve got a shower here. I’ve been very important to Disney. I’ve made them a lot of money. And they’re not being rude. But the reality is the parking space will go, the sign comes down, the set will be gone.”

The office would now be at home, the career would be, not in limbo (in addition to “Galaxy Quest,” he recently finished voicing his role in “Toy Story 2”), but decidedly less regulated than life on a sitcom. Given Allen’s self-described change phobia, then, it’s hardly surprising he wrestled with his instincts over ending “Home Improvement.”

“I don’t like second encores. I don’t like people who stay onstage too long,” he said. “Clearly, I wanted to end it, and even more clearly I have difficulty making people upset. And this decision upset a lot of people--notwithstanding Disney and ABC.”

Disney, the studio that owns “Home Improvement,” and ABC, the Disney-owned network for whom “Home Improvement” has been a mainstay throughout the 1990s, grappled with competing interests too. For while ABC still needed the show as a prime-time anchor, Disney had to consider the sitcom’s high-end cost. Based on the raises the stars wanted, it would have run as much as $3 million an episode just to secure Allen and Richardson, according to widely held estimates.

With a hit show, a studio will usually pass along such growing production costs to the network by increasing the licensing fee. But that formula didn’t work as neatly here, since Disney owns ABC and would have essentially been passing along the cost to itself.

Allen, meanwhile, was among a core group who for months was mulling ways to keep the show alive into next year, all the while getting miffed as the season dragged on without word from the network. But there was always, it seems, some wiggle room.

“I don’t know what they had in mind,” Allen said of the silence this year from ABC. “If they’d come to me with a plan, it might have been a different story. But they didn’t.”

Disney declined to comment. ABC Entertainment Chairman Stu Bloomberg, however, blithely dismissed the idea that ABC rejected the cost of bringing back Allen and Richardson, choosing instead to heap platitudes on the show.

“It was and is so important to us,” he said, underscoring the lineup reshuffling that “Home Improvement’s” departure is going to require. “It is so rare to have a signature show on your network, a show that is really associated with your network, [especially] in a time when it is difficult to have a series on that is attractive to a broad audience, meaning young adults, kids and teens.”

Pressed about why, then, the network didn’t pursue the show more aggressively for another season, some sources are inclined to point to the lawsuit muddying relations between ABC/Disney and the Wind Dancer Production Group, the company that produces “Home Improvement.” In the suit, which was settled last month, Wind Dancer accused Disney and ABC of using their corporate brotherhood to renew “Home Improvement” in 1997 at a price below fair-market value. The true value of the sitcom, the lawsuit contended, could hardly be measured when Disney was essentially leasing the show to itself.

But “not having a ninth season had nothing to do with the lawsuit,” said Williams, “Home Improvement’s” co-creator and longtime executive producer, dismissing the spin that the lawsuit impacted “Home Improvement’s” future. Williams said that Allen and the Wind Dancer producers had “theoretical discussions on and off the whole year” about how to build to another season.

In the end, Disney and ABC may have slouched toward the prudent financial move. Though “Home Improvement” is still a ratings-getter, its performance has dropped this season, and a new show that gets even a fraction of “Home Improvement’s” ratings could be more profitable than a sitcom with a multimillion-dollar budget. Of course, without “Home Improvement” to kick off Tuesdays, the network faces the risk that viewing the rest of the night will suffer accordingly.

Ultimately, what various sources confirm is that “Home Improvement’s” last season played out under an atmosphere of estrangement among its principal players. In such a climate, one insider noted, no one wanted to step forward and take responsibility for pulling the plug on a beloved family show. ABC only added to the confusion by running ads in early January teasing the final episodes of the show, before backpedaling. A few days later, after winning yet another People’s Choice Award, Allen finally announced that this year would be his last.

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None of this, of course, addresses a key issue: Was “Home Improvement,” after eight years, creatively tapped out?

This is not a question that stars, producers and executives tend to address head-on, because the implication is somehow impolite--that everyone’s sticking around just to make more money. Still, does a hit show like NBC’s “Frasier,” for instance, honestly have anything left to say? Or are audiences simply tuning in to watch people make millions of dollars, as is their right?

“It was clear, creatively, that there was nowhere else to go, unless you move the characters,” said Richardson of “Home Improvement.” “It was a very difficult year. It was very hard to squeeze out the shows that we did.”

To Richardson, who gave Jill Taylor a stronger female voice than many actresses cast opposite comics in the second banana/foil role, years 6 and 7 of “Home Improvement” were saved in part by episodes that turned serious; this season, in what networks like to call “a very special episode,” Jill had a hysterectomy.

But “most shows shouldn’t go past five [seasons],” she said. “It’s rare that a show can revitalize itself like ‘Cheers’ did.”

Unlike Allen, Richardson--interviewed several weeks after the final taping--professed to feeling liberated now that the show was over. OK, not entirely liberated (there was all that money she wouldn’t be seeing), but at least now she was free to spend time with her three children. A role opposite Peter Fonda in Victor Nunez’s 1997 film “Ulee’s Gold” suggested she could do more than be a sitcom mother, but Richardson knows that, for someone perceived as a “TV actress”--worse, a TV mom--the future isn’t paved with “Ulee’s Gold.”

“I walked away from a million dollars a week,” Richardson said. “You don’t do that unless you’re really sure it’s over.”

“Neither one of us cared about the money, because it was ridiculous amounts of money,” Allen echoed. “That’s all I heard from Middle America: ‘How bad can nine months be? How bad a situation is it to walk away from all that money? You’ll always regret that. You’ll hate yourself.’ The one that killed me was, ‘How bad can nine months be?’ I’m not a particularly greedy guy, but it keeps creeping in--jeez, look at what I’m walking away from. And I don’t really have anything lined up. Not like this.”

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Those two words--”it’s over”--have different implications for executive producer Williams.

What’s over, he says, are the days that nuclear families like the Taylors are considered breeding grounds for laughs. Does a family have to have a matricidal infant to be considered funny, as exemplified by Fox’s new animated series “Family Guy”?

In “Home Improvement’s” run, Williams watched as the tag “family comedy” went from compliment to albatross, as Wind Dancer tried and failed with other family-oriented fare like “Thunder Alley” and “Soul Man.”

“With the fragmentation of television, I think ‘Home Improvement’ is a bit of a dinosaur at this point,” Williams said, noting that his sitcom came along before the days when teens had an entire network--the WB--devoted to their needs, and a show that came on at 8 p.m. was deemed inherently inferior to those airing at 9.

“I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but I think the sad thing is, when you have hearth, home, family, all those [qualities] that have been near and dear to the American family, we roll our eyes at that,” he added.

To be sure, the price of “Home Improvement’s” God-and-country undertones was respect from peers in the industry, who were more apt to bestow Emmys upon--not to mention watch--more sophisticated competitors like “Frasier” and “Seinfeld.”

Even Richardson says she consistently fought for portrayals of the more realistic, uglier side of family life, knowing that better comedy can come from more heated conflict.

“I was always wanting the anger to be more edgy, for things [in the family] to be less perfect,” she said.

Allen learned to endure that stigma and to deal with the false perception that “Home Improvement” reflected his G-rated sensibility--that Tim Taylor was Tim Allen. The comedian realized this early on in the “Home Improvement” run, when he did a stand-up date in an arena and was surprised to see entire families in the audience.

“What’s odd is that when Jerry [Seinfeld] started out in comedy he was very clean and really didn’t react well to anyone who [swore],” Allen said. “I can’t even say ‘fart’ on the air. I was totally harnessed or muzzled on this show, totally muzzled. It was really tough for me to be the comedian that I am, because I’m not a particularly clean comedian.”

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Born with the somewhat unfortunate name Tim Dick, Allen achieved a simple but elusive dream: He became a stand-up comic, spent five or six years honing a character onstage (it was amazingly easy, he noticed, to turn audiences into sexist male posses), then adapted this personality to the sitcom template.

But unlike Seinfeld, whose stage voice blended seamlessly with the observational curmudgeon that he is in life, Allen had to sell off a portion of himself for success.

“Tim Allen is a figment of everybody’s imagination,” Allen said in an interview with The Times in 1994, when “Home Improvement” was at the height of its popularity. “It’s a character Tim Dick created, for stage. And now Tim Dick is way in the background. The guy who created all of this is very quiet, and you very rarely see him.”

Indeed, some who’ve spent time with Allen attest to a depth you wouldn’t suspect from the tool-wielding Tim Taylor of “Home Improvement.” Allen, they say, is interested not just in the meaning of his career but in the meaning of his life. A hungry reader, he delves into books on philosophy, Far Eastern religions, physics--looking to construct some ground beneath the heights of his celebrity.

“It’s not Madonna studying the Kabbala, it’s not the trend of the day for Tim,” said David Rensin, who has co-authored Allen’s two books, “Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man” and “I’m Not Really Here.”

In “Galaxy Quest,” Allen plays the washed-up former star of a “Star Trek”-type adventure series who get mistakenly plucked out of retirement to fight an actual space war. It’s a fitting commentary for a star who put his own TV persona to bed, lest it grow stale.