Shifting Gears Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Gabriel (Seann William Scott) and Maxwell (Daryl Mitchell) work in the restoration shop owned by Matt (Tim Allen), who has lots of opinions about the state of the world, and he doesn’t hesitate to give them a loud, grunting voice. “You know what we do make [in the US]? Excuses, quitters and diabetes,” he rants.
A beat-up old GTO rolls into the shop, which Matt recognizes as his old car. Out of it comes the person who took it 17 years prior: His daughter Riley (Kat Dennings), along with her teenage son Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and tween daughter Georgia (Barrett Margolis).
The two have been mostly estranged since Riley got pregnant at 18 and decided to get married to a musician. “He’s not a musician! He’s a bass player!” rants Matt. The last time they saw each other was at the funeral of Matt’s wife/Riley’s mom, and she only gave him a nod. Now she’s divorced and broke, and drove from Vegas to her former California home because she didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
Of course, the two of them go at each other right away, with Riley resisting the most when Matt tells his grandson Carter to learn to drive as a way to be self-sufficient. Matt, of course, thinks Riley coddles her kids too much, just like most kids these days are coddled. Of course, when Carter runs the restored hot rod they were using for practice driving into the garage, Riley gets ticked at Matt for prodding Carter to go behind the wheel.
Comedy veterans Mike Scully and Julie Thacker-Scully wrote the pilot of Shifting Gears, but they made way for the current showrunner, Michelle Nader, after that first episode (Allen is also an executive producer; Dennings is a producer). In the case of the two episodes we saw, both the Scullys and Nader are trying to attempt something that’s got a high degree of difficulty: combine the very different comedic sensibilities and styles of Allen and Dennings in a way that makes sense, and put emotional moments in each episode that feel earned.
Let’s just say it might take some time to get all of that balanced out. Allen starts out of the gate coming in hot with his “conservative guy complaining that we’re soft” shtick that he perfected in Last Man Standing, almost to the point where all Matt does is rant about the bad new days. Dennings is saying her lines in her usual sardonic way, and there’s a tone mismatch. Scott and Mitchell essentially yell their lines. It’s a cast full of comedy and sitcom veterans who are being given the thinnest of character and material to try to make funny.
But then, there’s a genuine moment in the first episode where Matt and Riley both mourn the fact that Riley’s mother is gone, and you can see where the show may be headed if Nader can straighten things out. There was an emotional connection between the stars that the previous 15 minutes of the show would have never indicated could happen, but it worked and it made the episode more than just a collection of Allen rants and other assorted gags. We’re just not sure if the two sides of this show can be integrated to the point where the emotional moments feel more integrated into the comedic story.
