Shifting Gears

“Shifting Gears” works because Allen and Dennings are believable as an estranged father-daughter pair trying to work it out. There’s humor there, but there’s also real emotion.

Allen is in “Last Man Standing” mode as a conservative crank but what makes “Gears” work is his sparring with Dennings, who holds her own against the sitcom veteran and gives as good as she gets.

Allen and Dennings do quickly strike a satisfying mix of antagonism and affection. Both know their way around a filmed-before-a-live-audience sitcom. .... The second episode — only two were available to watch — feels less focused. That there is nothing new to see here is not in the series’ disfavor. .... Formulas are formulas because they give consistent, reliable, unsurprising results.

Tim Allen and Kat Dennings make an entertainingly feisty duo as father and daughter in ABC’s new family sitcom Shifting Gears.

Currently, Shifting Gears lives and dies with Allen. This means that its success is directly tied to how much the audience loves the actor and the role he is known for.

“Shifting Gears” plays into the hands of audiences who loved its two stars. Neither goes too far afield from the personalities they helped create. While Dennings often seems like she’s on an uphill climb, Allen seems to be idling.

Allen’s show seems structured to let him spout off about hot button issues. If only his monologues were funnier. Instead, they seem designed to hit a checklist of things someone like Allen’s character would be annoyed about.

Lack of subtlety extends to obvious attempts at intergenerational humor. .... “Shifting Gears” is about a family stitching itself back together. Perhaps it’s fitting that it doesn’t yet feel like a cohesive whole.

In lieu of detail or nuance, Shifting Gears is counting on the redoubtable charm of its leads to cover for the elements that either make no sense or, more frequently, just aren’t interesting.

It's an unchallenging and not very funny package of generational stereotypes and grating banter between Allen and Dennings. The two episodes made available for review feature dialogue so bland it could have been written by AI.

This early in the run of a multi-cam sitcom, a lack of chemistry is understandable, as are redundant exposition dumps meant to help the traditional TV audience keep up with what’s happening across 22 fleeting minutes of story. But it’s less tolerable not to finish those stories, instead tacking on a feel-good moment completely disconnected from the episode’s central issue, and these emotional gulfs are made all the more obvious when the jokes around them are this lazy and poorly delivered.