Tim Allen and Kat Dennings’ Shifting Gears Gets A BIG NEWS amid Fans Are Eagerly Looking Forward To Season 2

Tim Allen and Kat Dennings’ New Sitcom Sets a Major Streaming Record

Sitcom vets Tim Allen and Kat Dennings have done it again. The two have united to co-star in an all-new sitcom for ABC, and the result has set an impressive record for the network.

Per Deadline, Allen and Dennings’ new series, Shifting Gears, has set an audience record for ABC with its subsequent viewership on streaming. In the first seven days following the show’s premiere on network television on Jan. 8, the episode ultimately drew almost 17 million viewers across ABC, Hulu, Hulu on Disney+, and digital platforms. When it first premiered, the first episode of Shifting Gears debuted with a strong same-day audience of 6.2 million, but its multi-platform viewership saw a rise to the tune of 173% over the course of one week.

Now, Shifting Gears stands tall for ABC as the strongest series debut for the network since the Roseanne spinoff series, The Conners, premiered in 2018. Shifting Gears is also serving as ABC’s most-watched streaming debut to date, as it pertains to streaming-only numbers across Hulu and Disney+. When not accounting for the premiere’s linear encores, the total number for Shifting Gears is at 12.5 million, which is still a bump of 101% from the same-day audience drawn on its premiere date.

The Reviews Have Been Middling (With a Higher Audience Score)

The high viewership hasn’t necessarily translated to critical acclaim. The series has been met with middling reviews, resulting in a score of 42% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, audiences have been enjoying the show much more so than the professional critics on the review aggregator website. Currently, Shifting Gears has a respectable audience score of 67%.

Allen is known in part for his sitcom work after starring in hit TV shows like Home Improvement and Last Man Standing. Dennings has since become a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but fans can still remember when she also co-starred in the hit sitcom 2 Broke Girls; she also played Bob Saget’s daughter in the short-lived series Raising Dad. With Shifting Gears, both Allen and Dennings can mark another successful sitcom for their respective bodies of work. While the show has not been officially renewed as of this point, the high viewership will certainly increase those odds substantially.

“Tim and I have such a fantastic relationship that we can really balance each other out in all these scenes, and we know what to do with them so that it’s still fun,” Dennings said of the show in a Collider interview. “Like you said, we all have a family member or a friend or somebody at work that we just cannot agree with, but we love them anyway. It’s like, ‘Let’s not start this conversation.’ We all have that. It is a very relatable situation and there’s just endless potential for comedy with that kind of thing. Hopefully, we get many, many seasons to do it. That’s what I hope.”

Hopefully, we get many, many seasons to do it.

Julie Thacker Scully and Mike Scully created the series, and Michelle Nader serves as showrunner. The show also stars Seann William Scott, Daryl Chill Mitchell, Maxwell Simkins, Barrett Margolis, and Jenna Elfman.

New episodes of Shifting Gears debut on Wednesdays on ABC at 8/7c.

Source: Deadline