Tim Allen told Us Weekly this week that the Home Improvement reboot he has spent the past two years quietly trying to set up has stalled, and that the reason has less to do with network logistics or scripting than with what the 71-year-old comedian frankly described as “personality problems” among the three actors who played his on-screen sons on the original ABC sitcom.
“It’s stuck,” Allen said. “Two of the boys are fine. The third is not. There are personality problems, and we just have not been able to work them out.” The comedian, currently in production on his Tim Allen Variety Hour for Fox, declined to name names. The original three sons were Zachery Ty Bryan (Brad), Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Randy) and Taran Noah Smith (Mark), each of whom has had a notably different post-Home-Improvement trajectory.
The Home Improvement reboot has been in soft development since 2023, when Disney’s 20th Television and ABC quietly took a development meeting with Allen and original showrunner Matt Williams. The original sitcom ran on ABC from 1991 to 1999, averaged 25 million weekly viewers at its peak, and remains one of the most-rerun primetime comedies of the past three decades. Variety reported Allen’s Us Weekly comments effectively confirmed the reboot’s pre-production stage but signaled the timeline has moved out by at least 12 months.
Deadline reported Patricia Richardson, who played Jill Taylor across the original series’ eight seasons, has been attached to the reboot conversation throughout the development cycle and is not the source of the personality friction Allen referenced. Earl Hindman, who voiced Wilson, the Taylors’ over-the-fence neighbor, died in 2003, and Allen has said in earlier interviews that the reboot will not attempt to recast that character.
Of the three sons, Bryan has had the most-publicized post-Home-Improvement period, with three arrests across 2020 to 2023 on misdemeanor and felony charges, all of which he has since worked through. Thomas, the most-famous of the three at the show’s peak as a tween-age MVP, retired from on-camera work in 2002 and has spent the past two decades behind the camera as a director. Smith has been the most-private and has not made a major public-facing acting appearance since 2010. None has commented on Allen’s Us Weekly remarks.
The reboot stall lands inside a broader Hollywood pattern. Of the legacy ABC sitcoms with a Disney development pipeline through 2026, several have either stalled or been pulled. The Boy Meets World follow-up Girl Meets World ended its Disney Channel run in 2017 with no spinoff cleared. The 2024 The Wonder Years reboot was canceled after two seasons. ABC’s other current legacy revival, the recently-announced Justin Hartley-produced A Forgotten Kill crime drama we covered earlier today, sits in a similar 20th Television development slot.
Allen has been particularly visible on the post-Home-Improvement nostalgia circuit. His Tim Allen Variety Hour, which Fox premiered in March, has held its time slot for the network and has been renewed for a second season through Q1 2027. He is also in production on the third season of his Last Man Standing follow-up, Shifting Gears, which has been pulled for ABC. The Home Improvement reboot, by virtue of its current stall, is the only Tim Allen project not currently on a Disney-owned-platform calendar.
20th Television declined to comment on Us Weekly’s piece. ABC’s communications team referred press requests to Disney’s broader scripted-development PR pool. Allen has not provided a new public-development update beyond his Us Weekly remarks, but his comedy-tour schedule through fall 2026 keeps the comedian on a press cycle that will give him further chances to clarify.
