Remembering Home Improvement
We all remember the great TV sitcoms of our time. Those of us old enough would rush home from school to grab a snack before doing our homework. After getting it all done and eating dinner with the family, we would huddle around our television sets and click on the shows that really made us feel good. We would cry over the relationships on Friends, all while hoping the next joke was a good one. Some of us would watch Frasier and try and understand the high class humor while pretending we knew all about it. But one of the most memorable shows centered around a couple with three young boys.
Home Improvement was a huge hit for many households in America because of how well it related to our very own home lives. Children with siblings instantly found themselves attached to the infighting and hijinks of Brad, Randy, and Mark. The age gaps were perfect as well, as they really allowed us to relate to them based on where we stood in the family.
The parents were of course, the star points of the show. You had the hardworking, thick headed, accident prone father in Tim Taylor. He worked a mans job that many fathers in the 90's could relate to. He worked with his hands and built things from nothing, often while trying to overdo it and soup things up causing hilarious aftermath. He was a mans man, always talking about the local sports teams and power tools. Coping with his families problems with humor as best he could, which allowed even more fathers to relate to the world of parenthood in their own way.
The mother, Jill, was everything we expected a television mother not to be after coming out of 80's TV shows. She was independent, hard working, and didn't take much sass from the family or her husband. She was also very book smart, much more than Tim could ever hope to be, and eventually pursued a very hard degree in college. This gave the empowering women everywhere a role model to strive for. Not only was she a great mother, but she wasn't kept in the kitchen the entire time, and often spoke her mind.
And of course, the show within a show, Tool Time. While modern TV shows have explored this notion just about to death, Tool Time really came home with making us feel like we were getting a two for one special when we watched Home Improvement. And each episode of Tool Time often spilled problems or hijinks over into Tim's daily life with his family.
Two other major characters, his lovable but snarky assistant Al that become a surrogate member of the family as the show went on, and his very wise and cryptic neighbor Wilson. An ongoing gag throughout the show was that you never saw anything below Wilson's eyes, even though he was often the problem solver for the Taylor family problems. A great piece of American television history.
