Last Man Standing is an American sitcom that started up on ABC in 2011. For those who are curious, it stars Tim Allen as the senior employee of a sporting goods store, who is a married father with three daughters as well as a grandson at the start of the series. Content-wise, Last Man Standing is notable in that it has a pretty clear political stance, which is perhaps unsurprising when it is headed up by Allen, who made a rather tasteless comparison between Republicans in Hollywood and Jews in Nazi Germany in 2017. Regardless, Last Man Standing is now being broadcast on Fox rather than ABC, so it should come as no surprise to learn that it has seen a fair amount of change over time.
How Has Last Man Standing Changed Since Season 1?
For starters, Last Man Standing isn’t one of those sitcoms in which the setting remains at a standstill. Instead, its characters continue to progress through their respective long-running narratives, which is responsible for much of the change between Season 1 and the current Season 7.
This can be seen in how the Baxter family has changed over time. As stated earlier, the series started out with Tim Allen playing a married father with three daughters as well as a grandson. By this point in time, the Baxter family has seen a fair amount of expansion, seeing as how both the oldest and the second oldest daughters Kristin and Mandy are now married. Besides this, there has been other changes as well, with examples ranging from how the Bud character has been written out of the series with a heart attack to how various side characters no longer appear in the series because the main characters’ stories have moved on from the contexts in which they would appear.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a fair amount of casting changes as well. However, it seems as though Last Man Standing has been more susceptible to this particular problem than a lot of its counterparts. For example, Kristin has been played by two separate actresses, with one being Alexandra Krosney in Season 1 and the two being Amanda Fuller ever since then. However, the most notable changes came with Season 7, though in fairness, that was connected to the move from ABC to Fox.
Speaking of which, Last Man Standing‘s move from ABC to Fox is perhaps the single best-known incident about the sitcom. In short, what happened was that Last Man Standing was cancelled in May of 2017 in spite of the fact that there were still a lot of people watching the series. This led to an enormous amount of speculation about the exact reasons behind the cancellation, which wasn’t helped by Allen’s comparison of Republicans in Hollywood to Jews in Nazi Germany a few months before the cancellation. However, the likelier cause isn’t a single thing so much as a couple of things. First, ABC decided to stop doing comedies on Friday nights, meaning that there was no longer a good time block for Last Man Standing to fit into. Second, ABC’s contract with 20th Century Fox was up, meaning that if it wanted to continue, it would have to pick up the production costs for Last Man Standing on top of renegotiating Allen’s already high salary. Judging by the fact that ABC dropped Last Man Standing, it is clear what it thought about soaking up those additional costs.
Whatever the case, there were a lot of people who responded to the cancellation in a negative manner. As a result, there was enough of a fervor that Last Man Standing winded up on Fox, though the success of the negotiations that led to said result was by no means guaranteed. Even then, a couple of the members of the main cast Molly Ephraim and Flynn Morrison opted not to return to the series for Season 7, while Kaitlyn Dever’s role was reduced to a recurring one because she had no commitments from signing on to play a role in a Netflix show called Unbelievable. Currently, it remains to be seen whether Last Man Standing will continue for an eighth season as well, but if it does, it will see a time block change because Fox is contracted to show WWE SmackDown in that time block starting in fall of 2019.
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