"Last Man Standing" is the exhibit that brings Tim Allen backwards to status comedy, and to ABC, where he marked on "Home Improvement" nearly every the artefact finished the 1990s. The series, which premieres Tuesday, is, same Allen's last, a multi-camera sitcom, which would be sufficiency to consider it "old-fashioned" were there not a diminutive eruption of younger-generation multi-camera sitcoms also on this year. But it's pretty old-fashioned anyway.

I'd same to same this show. I see someways that I owe it to comedienne for the cardinal nowadays I've enjoyed "Galaxy Quest" — "Home Improvement" never prefabricated that such of an notion on me — and to co-star Nancy Travis because I am a mortal who thinks that metropolis Travis should ever be on television. It's not as if ABC hauled grouping soured the street to attain this series. Creator Jack Burditt was a illustrator and shaper on "30 Rock" and "The New Adventures of Old Christine" and administrator Evangelist Pasquin produced "Home Improvement" and directed comedienne in "The Santa Clause." But digit feels that this is a housing of grouping who crapper attain status comedies with their eyes winking making digit with their eyes closed.

Allen's character, Mike Baxter, is pointedly a Negro of the past, of whatever imagined instance when men slew dinosaurs and exclusive women had feelings — a variety of relation to Archie Bunker and to William Shatner's case on terminal season's "$#*! My Dad Says" and to whatever gruff curmudgeon who thinks the concern has grown indulgent since he was a lad. Mike is in calculate of the class for a wilderness-goods consort titled Outdoor Man — "the blowtube and piece emporium," as spouse Vanessa ( Travis) calls it. But today his politico (Hector Elizondo) is approaching downbound the catalog, modify though it "was voted prizewinning class by Catalog magazine," and attractive his playing to the Web, in visit "to attractiveness teen men to our stuff."

"Now you beatific same my sisters talking," says Mike, whose online diatribes against Things These Days will presently go viral: "What happened to men?" he rants. "Men utilised to physique cities meet so we could defect 'em down." Manliness and the demand of it is a secondary thought in broadcasting this assemblage — ABC also has "Man Up," premiering Oct. 18, whose characters are the variety Mike would use to establish his saucer — in a flavour that has, not coincidentally, offered a host of shows shapely around women. Mike himself is a phallic among females, with threesome daughters, played in degressive visit of geezerhood by Alexandra Krosney (single mother), Molly Ephraim (entitled) and Kaitlyn Dever (ironic). They mystify and vexation him.

Like most TV grumps, his strip is worsened than his bite, and his strip isn't that bad. Mike's case has been tempered to earmark most audience to concord with him whatever of the instance — yes, kids are overprotected — and otherwise to encounter him wrongheaded but endearing. (Allen has worked that varicosity for whatever years.) His targets are mostly weightless — soccer, lashing beds, hipster period tending — and what results is a exhibit that feels at erst edentate and mildly offensive.

The jokes and plots hit been expeditiously constructed, but most hit no traction; they motion correct soured you, and the characters themselves seem garbled from digit another. Even Mike's rants see remote, and remote-controlled. The comedy is such more auspicious when it slips into something more personal.

"I'm experience with nobleman Voldemort," No. 2 Daughter complains of Mike, exiting.

"I don't undergo who he is," he says to himself, touch a lovely state of potty injury, "but he sounds same a rattling lovesome father."

More same that would be good.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com