Mike and Vanessa Baxter, is that you?! No, not quite, but Tim Allen and Nancy Travis are having a Last Man Standing reunion in the February 12 episode of Shifting Gears.
Swooon has an official first look at the ABC comedy’s Valentine’s Day episode and the unconventional meet-cute between Matt (Allen) and Charlotte (Travis).
While making a Valentine’s Day visit to his late wife’s grave at the community mausoleum, Matt meets Charlotte. The two strangers experience an unexpected connection in the most unlikely place.
“I’m a sucker for a Valentine’s Day episode,” Shifting Gears EP Michelle Nader told Swooon. “And ours is more about lost love which winds up being very poignant. Matt goes to the cemetery to visit his wife Diane’s grave and has a meet-cute with a widow whose husband is buried right next to her.”
This reunion marks the first time Travis and Allen have shared the screen since they played spouses on Last Man Standing. The sitcom, which originally aired on FOX and then moved to ABC, ran from 2011 to 2021.
Could Travis return to Shifting Gears again in the future? Only time will tell.
Allen clearly feels right at home in the sitcom world. In Shifting Gears, the actor plays the owner of a car restoration shop whose life is turned upside down when his estranged daughter and her two kids move into his house.
“I’ve done a full circle,” Allen told TV Guide Magazine. “I look around and I’m on the Disney lot, and I keep walking by the Home Improvement set, which is over that way. I sat in front of the set and they still have a sign on it: Home Improvement. I’m kind of finishing, if you will, where I started.”
