Patricia Richardson Had to ‘Defend’ Women to All-Male ‘Home Improvement’ Writers

Home Improvement famously starred Tim Allen as the accident-prone Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, who may or may not have been a stand-in for Jesus Christ. And while the series ended in 1999, that hasn’t stopped Allen from reuniting with his old co-stars (minus the kids that he totally narced on) in an entirely different sitcom

Patricia Richardson (who played Tim’s wife Jill), Richard Karn (who played Al Borland) and Debbe Dunning (“Tool Time Girl” Heidi) will all be appearing in the second season premiere of Allen’s show Shifting Gears. 

But just because the core gang is back together doesn’t mean that we should be expecting a full-blown Home Improvement reboot any time soon. As you might remember, back in the fall of 2023, Allen said that he had been talking to Karn and “the boys” about a follow-up to the hit ABC sitcom, possibly titled Home Re-Improvement. 

This turned out to be news to Richardson, who in 2024 revealed that neither she nor co-star Jonathan Taylor Thomas had ever been asked about a reboot. She also pointed out that Wilson (Earl Hindman) has been dead for two decades and Zachery Ty Bryan, who portrayed the eldest Taylor son, “is a felon.”

Now, thankfully, Richardson seems to be continuing her trend of calling bullshit on Allen’s Home Improvement nostalgia during the promotional push for Shifting Gears.

While speaking with Good Morning America, Allen said that the core of Home Improvement was Tim’s relationship with Jill. “I wanted the husband and wife to be really in love with each other,” he recalled. “Unlike other sitcoms.”

Richardson then pointed out that said relationship wasn’t always well-served by the show’s all-male writing staff, forcing her and Allen to rewrite the scripts. “Tim and I went in every Monday after the first read-through — because there were no women in the writing room really. So I got to go in and defend the woman’s point of view,” she revealed. 

Richardson was even more candid about this process during a 2019 interview, in which she similarly pointed out that the writing staff was “all men,” necessitating the uncredited rewrites. “There was no woman in the room to say, ‘This is not what women would do. This is not what women would say,’” Richardson explained. “And at first I was so intimidated because I’d been an actress all my life, and the lowest person on the totem pole. I couldn’t imagine telling writers or producers my opinion about anything.”

“Eventually I would start to say things like, ‘I don’t think a woman would say that,’” she continued. “I actually got lines like this from them, ‘Well it’s not like we don’t understand women, we’re married to them.’ I’d say, ‘No really, I’ve called all my sisters across the country, and we all agree, no woman would do that or say that or feel that.’”

She also claimed that the writers were “horrible to Tim.” Which might explain why his character endured way more physical torture than most sitcom dads.