Power Rankings: Malcolm in the Middle

17 Oct

 

(Power Rankings sum up:  Each week, we’ll pick a television show and rank the actors/actresses/contestants/correspondents/etc. based on what they’ve done after the series ended (unless we’re ranking a current series, in which case we’ll have to bend the rules).  Preference will be given to more recent work, but if the work was a long time ago, but much more important/relevant, that will be factored in as well)

We’re on a bit of a dip in these power rankings as for two consecutive weeks it turns out children who star in sitcoms aren’t often so successful afterwards.  I thought about throwing in a side character or two, but it’s not like any of them have much to write home about.  Admittedly it has only been five years since the show ended, but it doesn’t exactly seem like any of the younger actors have much momentum.  Alas, at least this show had one star who’s made something of a career for himself afterwards.

6.  Erik Per Sullivan (as Dewey) – It’s way too weird to think that Dewey is currently 20.  That said, his acting career hasn’t exactly taken off as he’s gotten older.  He appeared in an independent film called Mo in 2007 and in Joel Schumacher film Twelve in 2010.

5.  Justin Berfield (as Reese) – He was in one episode of Sons of Tuscon.  That’s it for acting.  However, he’s been more active as a producer, executively producing the short-lived Sons of Tuscon and now working as Chief Creative Officer of Virgin Produced, the television and film arm of Virgin Group.

4.  Frankie Muniz (as Malcolm) – Muniz hasn’t done so much acting in the years since Malcolm in the Middle – he was a serial killer in a Criminal Minds episode, and he had a cameo as Buddy Holly in Walk Hard.  That said, he’s probably the only actor to participate in open-wheel racing, where he competed in the Atlantic Championship in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

3.  Christopher Masterson (as Francis) – I knew this particular power ranking was not going to be the most fruitful, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this bad.  Masterson co-starred in independent films The Art of Travel,  Made for Each Other, and Impulse and appeared in a White Collar episode.

2.  Jane Kaczmarek (as Lois) – Immediately after Malcolm ended, she co-starred in short-lived Ted Danson sitcom Help Me Help You.  A couple of years later she starred as Judge Trudy Kessler for the two season TNT legal drama Raising the Bar.  In 2010, she was in Lifetime movie Reviving Ophelia.  She appeared on an episode of Wilfred, portrays Whitney Cummings’ mom on new series Whitney and has appeared multiple times in The Simpsons as Judge Constance Harm.

1.  Bryan Cranston (as Hal) –Cranston has been quite busy since Malcolm ended, but even if he hadn’t, he’d be on top of this list because of two words – Breaking Bad. Cranston has starred for four seasons as chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-maker Walter White, who has quickly become one of the great characters in television history.  Breaking Bad has received acclaim from all corners and each season moves up in the all-time television pantheon. For what it’s worth, he’s won three emmys for the role so far.  Cranston portrayed Ted’s boss in How I Met Your Mother in two episodes.  He appeared in ABC Family miniseries Fallen.  He also had supporting roles in 2011 movies The Lincoln Lawyer, Larry Crowne, Contagion and Drive.

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Fall 2011 Review: Homeland

15 Oct

There were a couple of candidates for the most interesting new show of the Fall, but I think I’ve found it in Homeland (so far, anyway).  I only kind of understood what the show was about coming in, but I leave the show a lot more intrigued than I was before watching.

At the beginning of the episode, Claire Danes’ character, Carrie Mathison, CIA officer, is in Iraq, and gets a message from an Iraqi prisoner set to be assassinated.  She gets the message after she promises to protect his family after bribing her way into the prison to talk to him.  Ten months later, she’s back in Washington and on the CIA shitlist for bribing her way into the prison.  We then learn two key pieces of set up for the show.  First, a marine taken prisoner of war eight years ago has been found alive by American special forces and is coming back home a national hero, and two, the piece of information Mathison got was that Al Qaeda had managed to turn a prisoner of war, which Mathison guesses to be the marine, Nicholas Brody, portrayed by Damian Lewis.

The episode follows the twin paths of Mathison and Brody.  Mathison, a career-driven agent, who is convinced that Brody is a terrorist, trying to circumvent the law whenever necessary to get the information to prove to her boss and mentor that Brody was turned, and Brody slowly trying to work himself back into a society he’s been out of for eight years, meeting a family he hasn’t seen, and a son he barely knows.

The supporting cast played less of a role in the premiere, but seems interesting.  On Brody’s side are his wife and his good friend, who have been sleeping together in his absence.  On Mathison’s side are her mentor, Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin, who believes in Mathison’s competence but is concerned about her tendency to take things too far, and her boss David Estes.

Underpinning this all is an intense psychological thriller.  Danes might be right, and Brody is a terrorist waiting to happen, and every moment not following his every move is a moment wasted.  Or, Danes might be crazy or obsessive – we get some hints she’s a little off her rocker in the first episode.  It may slightly lean towards the former in the first episode; we know he lies in his debriefing from quick visions we see inside his head.  Still, I’m counting on the fact that there’s a lot we don’t know and that it can still go either way.  In my opinion, the show would lose a lot if it just spilled the beans too early about what was really going on; part of what’s great is the intense psychological showdown and the lack of clear objective truth.

Will I watch again?  Book it – this is one of the highlights of the new shows, if not the best.  Danes is fantastic, and there’s a lot of different ways this can go, and still be great.  I can’t think of another television show quite like it.  After watching The Killing, I’ve developed a fear that every intense show with a great premiere is just waiting to go downhill, but hopefully this show will start building back my optimism.

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Show of the Day: The Adventures of T-Rex

14 Oct

Everybody my age, and probably just about everybody older and younger to a certain extent, watched cartoons growing up.  Which cartoons differ, but everyone excitedly woke up early before school (what was wrong with us?) just to get in a couple of cartoon episodes before the school bus came.  If you had cable, you probably watched cable.  If you didn’t, like me, you watched whatever was syndicated which ended up being a combination of Japanese cartoons, super obscure cartoons, and super obscure Japanese cartoons.

These cartoons tend to be ephemeral – cheaply made and quickly and easily forgotten.  They’re not made for their replay value; they’re made to entertain kids who won’t really think too hard about their quality.  The morning cartoons tended to be of even lower quality than the afternoon cartoons, where some of them may have retained a modicum of replay value like the strangely complicated plots of X-Men or the comic antics of Darkwing Duck.  Morning cartoons were more like Pink Panther or Mummies Alive!.  The most morning of the morning cartoons, the most at once disposable but because I grew up watching it for an entire year personally unforgettable was The Adventures of T-Rex.

The Adventures of T-Rex stands out ironically because for years I was convinced that it didn’t exist and I had just invented it.  I’m convinced everyone has one cultural moment from their childhood like this.  Some tv show, commercial, movie or song that they saw or heard when they were very young and before the internet (probably can’t happen as easily now) and can’t find anybody else who recognizes it.  The more people who give them quizzical stares and have no idea what they’re talking about, the more they think for a second each time, maybe it’s not real, maybe it’s some figment of my imagination that I created.  The Adventures of T-Rex was this for me.  What helped though, was that my brother remembered it as well, but I thought maybe we had just reinforced each other’s notions over the years.

Eventually, I found one other person in college who recognized it and it was a moment of sweet vindication.  This cartoon was real, something I believed it for so long was not a lie.  Wikipedia eventually got on board and published an article about the show.

The Adventures of T-Rex involved a world where everyone were anthropomorphic talking dinosaurs, and T-Rex was the collective of five dinosaur brothers who each wore different colors and had a different powers\ they used to fight crime.  During the day they played at a jazz club.  At night, they charged around Rip City in their Rexmobile seeking to find crime kingpin “Big Boss” Graves while spewing witticisms.  It lasted one year from 1992 to 1993, aired for 52 episodes and was a cooperative effort between Japan and America (it takes two countries to produce a show this good). The show is most memorable to me for it’s theme song, and I can’t even defend that as particularly memorable to anyone except me.  Still, the show will always have a special place in my heart, more so because it really existed.

Fall 2011 Review: Hart of Dixie

13 Oct

Unforgettable was exactly what I thought it would be, and so is Hart of Dixie, but as a very different type of show.  I’ll talk about the premise in more detail below, but I can pretty much sum it up like this:  big-city-super-educated-doctor-girl moves into small-hick-southern town, learns that the people there aren’t so bad after all.

That’s basically all I need to get across the main gist of the show.  That said, here’s a little bit of a longer version.  Rachel Bilson portrays Dr. Zoe Hart (yes, let’s spend a second on the literalness of the pun in the title, Saving Grace and others like it have a successor), a high-powered doctor whose had her whole life planned out since she was a kid. She wanted to be like her dad and become a Cardio-thoracic surgeon, working with him in his practice.  She is shocked when she doesn’t get the fellowship she needs because, as she learns, she doesn’t have the people skills needed to be a top doctor.  The person who grants the fellowships tells her to get some practice as a general practitioner, and then come back and reapply.  Meanwhile, she has had a strange outstanding offer from a general practitioner in a small Alabama town, a Harvey Wilkes, to come down to his practice and help out.  She takes him up on the offer, only to find out when she gets there that he died recently, but left his half of his practice to her.  She then has a number of City Slickers moments, meeting the (main) characters of the town and not fitting in everywhere, and she feels alienated.  Her mother comes down begging her to leave, and she is planning on it, until she is forced to help deliver a pregnancy at a wedding, and also finds out that Harvey Wilkes was her true biological father.  She then decides to stay and learn about her biological father and about being a general practitioner and about growing as a person.

Okay, so the simple explanation was probably just as useful as the long one in determining what kind of show it is, but that doesn’t say whether or not it’s good.  Like Unforgettable, I think part of it is just whether the type of show appeals to you, in particular because I think the show was nothing notably good or notably bad.  I liked Rachel Bilson more than I thought I would, and I do think she has the charm and likeability to carry a show, and I enjoyed Scott Porter (Jason Street from Friday Night Lights) speaking with a southern accent.  If you like the actors, and you like a little fluffy drama with some probable light soapiness,  you’ll probably like the show.  It’s not close to can’t miss television though.

Will I watch it again?  No, I won’t.  There just isn’t enough going on.  There’s nothing wrong with it, per se; it’s not bad.  It’s just not that interesting either.  It’s cute and it’s light and I appreciate the draw of shows like that but I already watch a couple that satisfy that sector for me.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 14: The Office

13 Oct

Let’s put this right out there.  I know quite a fair number of people who were long time Office fans for the first three, four, or five seasons who just don’t watch it anymore.  It’s over the hill they say, jumped the shark, however you want to put it.  To me, that’s a lot of shit.  Has that happened in shows before?  Certainly.  I’ve complained about it myself.  And I’m making no claim that The Office as of 2011 and seventh or eighth season is as good as it’s ever been in its entire run.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not quite good and funny and enjoyable.

Admittedly this season was particularly strange, paving the way for the departure of Michael Scott, with guest star Will Ferrell as a potential replacement boss appearing in the last few episodes of the season.

Some people have said, Steve Carell is leaving, maybe that’s a sign you should just end the show, whether to put it out of its misery, or whether it’s going out on top.  Normally, I’d think they have a good point. It can look desperate to replace a major character in a comedy, and worse than appearances, there’s a huge risk of it simply not working.  The show got so far because of the chemistry and laughs generated by the core current cast.  When you risk throwing that off, you could have a show that would never make it on air as a pilot, but automatically gets a season because of the show’s pedigree.  In this instance though, I’m not particularly worried, at least about Steve Carrell leaving, although, of course, who they bring in is another matter.  I’ve been advocating Steve Carell leave the show for another boss for a couple years now.  Not at all because I think he’s done a bad job. On the contrary, I think he’s been able to make a character awkward and funny in a way I think very few actors could pull off.  Still, the character has inherent limitations and it’s a credit to him and the writers that they were able to continue to generate laughs until the end, but fresh blood can be a good thing.

Just looking through the episodes of the most recent season I recall funny segments.  In the last episode with Will Ferrell the oddly hilarious dunk attempt that landed him in a coma –  I can’t explain exactly why, but my friend and I laughed for five minutes straight and had to pause the show.  Dwight at the garage sale, starting small and then trading up, until he is sold on Jim’s magic beans.  Dwight and Jim gags may be the most resilient part of the show.  By all rights, they should get old, but they never do.  Ryan’s grilling of Pam about her Christmas comic book gift was fantastic and emblematic of the newest and best iteration of Ryan’s character as a pretentious hipster.

A word is also worth saying about how the Office’s attempts to add new blood (new blood?  fresh blood?  same difference) with new receptionist Erin and corporate liaison/stooge Gabe have very much worked.  Gabe becoming wholly unhinged by Erin’s awkward and extremely public break up with him turned into what may have been one of the funniest running arcs of the season, highlighted in the last episode when he quizzed Andy, during his interview, about the sun, and when Andy knew the answers, ordered him to “Shut up about the sun!” Erin carefully walks the line between adorable empty-headedness and maybe-she-has-an-actually-problem with the defining moment possibly being her believing that disposable cameras were for disposing immediately after you took the pictures.

Why it’s this high:  It’s still The Office, more or less, Dwight and Jim antics are hilarious, they continue to do good work

Why it’s not higher:  Yes, you should still watch it, but no, it’s not as good as it was during maybe the third season

Best episode of the most recent season:  There’s no obvious choice but I’ll take “Andy’s Play” which had one of my favorite scenes of the season at the end – Michael’s word-for-word rendition of a Law & Order episode as an audition

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Fall 2011 Review: Unforgettable

12 Oct

Poppy Montgomery’s character Carrie Wells can never forget.  No, really, she has an exceptionally rare medical condition in which she remembers EVERYTHING.  She used to be a cop up in her hometown of Syracuse, but she couldn’t deal with the memory so she moved toNew York, volunteers at a nursing home and makes money counting cards at blackjack.  That is, until a murder happens in her building and she runs into her old partner and lover, played by Dylan Walsh (of Nip/Tuck fame).  After catching up, he convinces her against her initial resentment to help them with the case by remember some things about the murdered woman’s apartment, which Carrie had been to a few weeks before the murder.  She helps them arrest one suspect, and then another more correct one and her ex eventually convinces her to come on board by showing her that she can still get closer to figuring out the one thing she can’t remember, the mysterious disappearance of her sister which she’s been trying to figure out since she joined the force years ago.

While American Horror Story was the strangest show amongst premieres, Unforgettable was probably the most predictable.  It’s as close to a straight CBS procedural as there is amongst the new shows this year.  Every week, there will be a crime, and Wells will consult to the police using her memory somehow to solve it (I’m not sure how they use this gimmick for twenty two cases a year, but I’m sure they’ll figure out a way).  Every once in a while, we’ll see a little bit of plot movement on the serial story of her figuring out what happened to her sister, and if we get a few seasons, maybe we’ll actually find out.

It’s hard to say much about this show that goes farther than what you already know from reading the summary.  It’s exactly what you think it is, and that’s neither a good nor bad thing.  If you like that kind of show, if you’re always watching CBS procedurals, it’s worth at least giving a chance, and if you like the actors, you’ll like, and if it’s not your kind of show, don’t even bother.

Two quick points – first, CBS is the network forNew Yorkshows this year, and Unforgettable continues the trend of A Gifted Man and Person of Interest highlighting the fact that they’re set in NY, here with some seriousEast Rivershots.  Second, there’s a flashback to when Wells is first getting together with Dylan Walsh and they play the song “It’s Been Awhile” by Staind to both represent the year (2001) and the fact that, well, it’s been a while since that scene happened.  Pretty brilliant.

Will I watch it again?  No, I’m not going to.  I don’t watch any police procedural show on a regular basis, be it a CSI, Mentalist or NCIS.  I hold absolutely no animus towards any of these shows; they’re almost all various degrees of watchable and I could do worse than spending a lazy morning hour watching Criminal Minds or an Unforgettable.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame: Eddie Cibrian

12 Oct

I had literally never heard of Eddie Cibrian before I watched The Playboy Club but after doing a little research I had stumbled upon a true TV all-star.

His first role was in an episode of Saved by theBell: The College Years and he followed that up with a spot in a The Young and the Restless.  He then appeared in one episode of anthology series CBS Schoolbreak Special in 1995 and then in the following year appeared in single episodes ofBeverly Hills90210 and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.  He had a co-starring role in the next television season in David Hasselhoff’s Baywatch Nights.  From 1997 to 1999 he starred in the short-lived daytime soap operaSunsetBeach. As Cole Deschanel, a character who, well, it’s a soap opera, so everything.  During those same years he appeared in a couple of TV movies, 3deep andLogan’s War: Bound by Honor.

He was in a couple of films around the turn of the century, and in 2001 an episode of Citizen Baines.  He got his biggest role yet (and still) as a co-star in NBC’s Third Watch, which showcased police officers, firefighters and paramedics inNew York City from 3 to 11PM, the title Third Watch.  Cibrian portrayed firefighter Jimmy Doherty for the first five years of the series (there were six total which I want to point out is about three more than I thought there were).  He had some gambling problems, he slept with his wife’s sister, running his first marriage, and then eventually ruined his best chance for a second marriage, and got shot at the end of the first season.  He eventually got back with his first wife, got promoted to Captain, and disappeared from the show.  He appeared in an unaired pilot for a show based on John Grisham’s The Street Lawyer as the title street lawyer.

After he left Third Watch, he starred in one season of the supernatural Invasion as Park Ranger and marine biologist Russell Varon.  He also appeared in nine episodes of Tilt at about the same time. After Invasion was cancelled, Cibrian became the lead character in the one season Vanished the next year as FBI Agent Daniel Lucas, who takes over the search for the missing wife of aGeorgiasenator after another FBI agent is murdered mid-way through the season.  Caught without a regular role, he appeared in a number of shows, including an unaired pilot for Football Wives, an American adaptation of the british smash Footballers Wives, single episodes of Dirty Sexy Money and Criminal Minds and two of Samantha Who?.

He appeared in seven episodes of Ugly Betty and three episodes of The Starter Wife.  He starred in Northern Lights, a TV movie on Lifetime based on a Nora Roberts novel, in 2009, with LeAnn Rimes, who he cheated on his wife with and later married.  In 2009-10 he starred in a season of CSI:Miamias Jesse Cardoza, as a detective who returns from LAPD to work inMiamiwhere he started.  He was killed while in the lab which was poisoned by serial killer Bob Starling.  He appeared in three episodes of Chase and then got a starring role in this current season’s The Playboy Club on NBC, which was the first show cancelled, after three episodes.  He played Nick Dalton, a mysterious lawyer running for state’s attorney with ties to the mob.

Oh, and he was also in also in a boy band with two other actors from 1996 to 2001 which was unheard of in the US but had a top 10 hit, “Into You,” on the Canadian charts.

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Fall 2011 Review: How to Be A Gentleman

11 Oct

I expected How to Be A Gentleman to be truly despicably awful on the level of Whitney, but it really wasn’t on that level, it was just merely not good at all.  It wasn’t cringeworthy.  I didn’t have trouble getting through the show.  It was just quite bad.

The premise is that David Hornby (Rickety Cricket from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) portrays an old school “gentleman” who opens doors for women and helps old ladies cross the street, and writes a column titled “How to Be A Gentleman” about well, you can figure it out.  His magazine, boss Dave Foley, lets him know, has been bought and is changing its target, and if he wants to remain employed he’ll make his column young and edgy and far less Gentleman-like.  Of course, he doesn’t know anything of that world.  He uses a birthday gift from his sister (Mary Lynn Rajskub, or Chloe from 24) for a training session at a gym which it turns out is run by a old high school bully, Bert Lansing (Kevin Dillon, or Entourage’s Johnny Drama virtually reprising his role).  Bert, feeling guilty about all the bullying years ago, is a bro, who wants to help Hornby’s character out, and Hornby, needing to learn this lifestyle for his column agrees.

It’s a CBS comedy and it feels like a CBS comedy.  The laughter is canned, the angle is multi-camera, and there are slow breaks between jokes as we gather ourselves to prepare for the next one.

Even in a weak new season for comedy (New Girl is the best, and it’s not great), How To Be A Gentleman is fairly terrible.  One of my issues is that it conflates being a “Gentleman” with being a total loser.  I’m not sure why those things need to go together, but that seems to be what’s going on here.  His family, at his birthday dinner, notes what a loser he is and how he wouldn’t have to be if he wasn’t so uptight, or in his mind, so gentlemanly.  It’s kind of irritating to watch just how loser-ish he is time and again, more so than anyone would be in real life.  Every character is far over the top, unrelatable, and not funny.

This is one of a mini-trend of sitcoms about emasculated men searching for manliness with ABC sitcoms Man Up and Last Man Standing.  I’m really to think of a way for the trend to work, but it seems misguided from the get go.

Will I watch it again?  No.  I honestly wish the cast assembled had something a bit better to work with but I can’t in good conscience be wasting time with a lousy show like this when there are so many better shows on tv.

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Rankings the Show I Watch – 15: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

11 Oct

It’s frankly amazing how long this show has been on the air, and just how big it’s become.  The scientific factor I use to determine its popularity is number of green men, the green lyrca full body suit mascot that Charlie wears during a couple of episodes.  I see at Philadelphia and national sporting events, and on Halloween.  The actual suit only appeared in three episodes of the series, and yet it spawned a phenomenon as green men are everywhere.

The show has the potential to get tiresome. In each episode, the “gang” – as the characters are known find a topic, be it racism, terrorism, abortion, or sometimes less political and more random, and go off, offending tons of people in the process and coming out making fools of themselves.  Yet it stays relatively fresh, and the writers have done a pretty good job of thinking of material that is new enough to keep me laughing.  I really tried to hold off this comparison for as long as could, even though I wanted to use it all article, but Curb Your Enthusiasm really is by far the most similar show on TV to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  They’re both basically shows that apply a similar process to a new set of facts every episode. You can enter a situation into the It’s Always Sunny machine, and it’s pretty easy to figure out how things are going to go, but it still generally ends up being pretty funny.  Like in Curb, it’s all about the main characters, and everyone else is the world is just someone for them to play off of. While in Curb about equal times the other characters are crazy or normal, in It’s Always Sunny, they’re generally normal conservative folks who are utterly outraged by the gang’s lewd, selfish and inappropriate behavior.

Highlights of the last season include Dennis implying that Mac and he will bring some women onto a boat, and since they can’t get off, there will be an “implication,” which is disturbing even for Mac.  Another highlight is the gang’s drunken memories in flashback form of a Halloween party in which Dee may have gotten pregnant, and in which Dee is remembered as more and more birdlike, eventually ending up as an ostrich.

Looking over the episode list, there aren’t quite as many stone cold classics as there have been in previous seasons, though to be fair, my opinions could change, for good or ill, with a second viewing.

Why It’s This High:  No show generates more out loud laughs than It’s Always Sunny, even after six years; Charlie makes me laugh.

Why it’s not higher:  It’s a little bit hit and miss, a little bit repetitive, some episodes are better than others, some of the best ideas were used seasons ago

Best Episode of the Most Recent Season:  “Mac’s Big Break” – My friends and I became somewhat obsessed with this strange part of the episode in which Dennis uses a strange voice on his radio show asking about the US’s involvement in two wars – I can’t find anything on youtube, so you’ll just have to watch the full episode.

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Power Rankings: Home Improvement

10 Oct

(Power Rankings sum up:  Each week, we’ll pick a television show and rank the actors/actresses/contestants/correspondents/etc. based on what they’ve done after the series ended (unless we’re ranking a current series, in which case we’ll have to bend the rules).  Preference will be given to more recent work, but if the work was a long time ago, but much more important/relevant, that will be factored in as well)

We’ve got a relatively short one this week – last week I did a show I barely watched when it was on (3rd Rock from the Sun) and was surprised how well the actors had done.  This week I take on a show that I saw every week for years and the actors have not fared so well.  We’re giving Earl Hindman a pass because he died in 2003.  RIP,Wilson.

7.  Taran Noah Smith (as Mark Taylor) – that’s it.  Seriously.  There is nothing on his IMDB page after 1999.

6.  Debbe Dunning (as Heidi Keppert) – she was in one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and seven of something called Wicked Wicked Games.  This cast is brutal.

5.  Jonathan Taylor Thomas (as Randy Taylor) – the breakout star of the show at the time, he was big enough that he quit the last season of Home Improvement, and didn’t even return for the series finale.  That was the height of his powers sadly.  Afterwards, he’s appeared in a couple of indie films, an episode of Ally McBeal, two of Smallville, three of 8 Simple Rules and one Veronica Mars.  He also voiced a character in a Simpsons episode and five of The Wild Thornberrys.

4.  Zachery Ty Brian (as Brad Taylor) – At least he’s working as an actor.  Since Home Improvement ended, he’s been mostly working in single episode appearances.  Two episodes of Family Law, one of Touched by an Angel, one of ER, and three of Boston Public.  He was in one Buffy, one Smallville, two Veronica Mars, three of Center of the Universe, and one Cold Case.  He was in two K-ville, one of the new Knight Rider and one Burn Notice.  Oh, and he’s cousins with Broncos QB Brady Quinn.

3.  Patricia Richardson (as Jill Taylor) – She appeared in Lifetime’s Strong Medicine in a starring role for it’s three seasons.  She also appeared in nine episodes of The West Wing as the campaign director for Alan Alda’s Republican presidential candidate.  Since, she’s been in a couple of TV movies.

2.  Richard Karn (as Al Boreand) – When Karn is ranked second, you know you’re in trouble.  His most prominent work by far has been as host of Family Feud from 2002-2006.  Currently, he hosts the Game Show Network’s Bingo America.  Aside from that, he appeared in a couple of Air Bud direct to video sequels and a That ‘70s Show episode.

1. Tim Allen (as Tim Taylor) – Most of his biggest work after Home Improvement has been sequels to movies he made while starring in the show.  This includes two Toy Storys and two Santa Clauses.  Aside from that, he’s mostly been in bombs like Big Trouble and Christmas with the Kranks.   He’s also had a successful career narrating commercials, for Chevrolet and Campbell’s soup.  He’ll be starring in Last Man Standing this fall, which I don’t expect to last much longer.

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