#Tim allen last man standing series

I don’t want this going.” And it kind of gives you that head fake. I thought it actually worked quite well because there’s the false ending to that scene, when Kyle gives what could have been the emotional end of the scene, which is, “I wish it wasn’t gone. But she was shooting “Dear Evan Hansen,” so just the logistics of quarantine and being able to get her on set, we were not going to be able to do it. We would have written it differently and probably would have still wanted to save her for the final emotional endpoint of that memorial scene.

If we’d been able to get Kaitlyn live, we would have devised the scene differently. That was a decision driven solely by the realities of COVID. Was that a creative choice you made on purpose or one that COVID made for you? Kaitlyn Dever makes her final guest appearance as Eve, Mike and Vanessa’s youngest daughter, via Zoom from the Air Force academy during the memorial scene. One of the reasons we wanted Jay Leno on the show is that he’s always such an upbeat presence, and we were able to inject comedy in a highly emotional situation. We wanted it to be a happy week, as much as you could under the circumstances. It just was very hard to picture it not being kind of a sad week. They all just seemed to dwell in the maudlin.

#Tim allen last man standing series

I mean, that scene was tough enough for them to get through as a metaphor that I can only imagine if we were constantly dwelling on it… We broke some other stories as the series finale, like Kyle moving on to the priesthood, or Ed retiring and throwing a goodbye party for him. Other than that, we wanted to keep it fun, not only for the audience’s sake, but frankly for the actors’ sake. That was the one scene that I wanted to allow the cast members to express their feelings for the series through the metaphor. And then we just saved the emotion until we got to the memorial scene. So that’s why, when Matt came up with the idea of using the truck as a metaphor for the show - something that you loved being taken from you that you worked on for a long time - we were able to kind of do an episode that would have been just a normal episode and wrap it around that. We wanted to honor it and have it, but not to dwell on it. And then we felt like we would save the goodbye to the series for the second half of the show, and we wanted to confine that as much as possible. We did three storylines where we were kind of pointing the direction of where these characters are going to go on with their lives once the series itself ends, and address that that way.

In the first half hour of the show, we told the individual stories.

Essentially, what we decided to do was to split it into two halves. That is the big question that we asked ourselves, how do we do this so that it’s not just a maudlin, cryfest of an ending, because I think that would be untrue to what the series was. Our first and foremost job is to bring joy to people. We want to put people through things and get them to some really emotional truth, but always with fun. Matt and I always approached it with the sense that we want to base it on true emotion. TheWrap: How did you decide how heavy to go in the finale, in terms of the tone you wanted to close “Last Man Standing” on?Ībbott: We really like to have emotion in our show. Here, Abbott breaks down the decisions that went into the final episode of “Last Man Standing,” including why Allen got his first-ever writing credit on the show for the finale and how they managed to virtually work in Kaitlyn Dever’s Eve for that “punch” of a scene with Mike.