Welcome Tim Allen back to the land of multicamera sitcom, for a third run in a form that has treated him well. “Home Improvement” ran for eight seasons on ABC and is arguably what allowed him to become a film star; “Last Man Standing,” which returned him to television after a decade in the movies, finished a nine-season run (six on ABC, three on Fox) in 2021. And here he is again, once more on ABC, with “Shifting Gears,” premiering Wednesday, which, if past is prelude, should just about see Allen — a fit 71, his tight T-shirt would like you to know — into his 80s.
Allen plays Matt, who — importing Allen’s own automotive interests — runs a garage specializing in vintage and custom cars. (Working here we find Daryl Mitchell as Stitch, a wise wisecracker, and Seann William Scott as Gabriel, handsome, amiable, a little dim.) Literally driving back into Matt’s life, in a filthy Pontiac GTO she stole from him 15 years before, when taking off pregnant with a musician boyfriend, is his daughter Riley (Kat Dennings). She’s getting divorced, musicians being what they are, and needs a place to land with her two kids, moony teenager Carter (Maxwell Simkins) and cheerful little Georgia (Barrett Margolis), who has a thing for inventor and “Shark Tank” panelist Lori Greiner and dreams of becoming a billionaire. (The kids are excellent.)
“Well, good luck finding a man who’s OK with his wife making more money than him,” says Matt, an old-fashioned sort of fellow.
“I don’t need a man to feel complete,” replies Georgia.
“You want to kill a spider, a man’s going to look pretty darn good.”
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“I have a shoe.”
Father and daughter have been estranged, more or less — the kids do know their grandfather — since the death of Riley’s mother some indefinite years before; she was the bridge that allowed them to have a relationship. Riley, a former wild child, voted “Mean for No Reason” by her high school class, is trying to raise her kids with a sensitivity that Matt, who is all “in my day we were,” regards as coddling. And so they must learn to get along under the same roof. You get the picture.
Allen plays Matt, a widowed owner of a classic car restoration shop, whose estranged daughter, Riley (Dennings), and her children come back into his life. Dennings, left, Maxwell Simkins, Barrett Margolis, Allen and Seann William Scott.
(Raymond Liu / Disney)
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When “Last Man Standing,” in which Allen played a not dissimilar character, went on the air in 2011, we were in the third year of the first Obama administration, and a show with a volubly conservative lead character played a little differently in the TV ecosystem; now, on the verge of heaven knows what, such a character reads as something like an adorable, almost moderate curmudgeon. Matt reads the Wall Street Journal and rails against television pundits “telling you what you’re supposed to think about the news, like I‘m too stupid to form my own angry opinion.” When Stitch, anticipating one of Matt’s rants, says, “Let me guess, we’re all going to hell in a hand basket,” Matt replies, “We don’t even make hand baskets in the U.S. anymore. We do make excuses, quitters and diabetes, and celebrities that use diabetes medicine to lose weight.” He describes Gabriel’s dirty hat as looking like “a normal hat that was left in Portland too long.”
The tenor of such softball japes can make “Shifting Gears” feel behind the times. There’s something sort of dutiful about the show’s sociopolitical humor, such as it is, which exists more to give the characters something to bat around than to say anything substantial about How We Ought to Live Now. And no one is batting very hard; this is, after all, a show about loving your difficult relations and putting differences aside. (Riley: “Can we try to talk to one another like rational adults? Matt: “Have you watched the news lately? That’s not a thing anymore.”) Classic stuff.
Allen and Dennings do quickly strike a satisfying mix of antagonism and affection. Both know their way around a filmed-before-a-live-audience sitcom. (Dennings spent six seasons on “2 Broke Girls.”) They’re very good talking over one another, and very good not knowing exactly what to say. In one tender moment, side by side on a couch, unsure how to reach out, he touches her … foot. To the extent that there’s a new Tim Allen here, it’s the one who, thinking of his late wife, and the flour sifter he has taken care not to clean, he cries, almost, sort of. But there has always been a soft center to his self-important characters. (And who, really, needs a new Tim Allen?)
“It’s been really different here, alone,” he tells Riley. “I think that’s why I watch the news in the morning, so I can hear a woman’s voice — even though it’s sometimes Nancy Pelosi.”
“Yeah, it’s annoying the way she’s trying to save democracy.”
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The series was created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker Scully, “Simpsons” writers and co-creators with Amy Poehler of the animated series “Duncanville.” They reportedly left after the pilot (directed by John Pasquin, who directed about a fifth of “Home Improvement” and more than a third of “Last Man Standing” episodes), which is perhaps why the second episode — only two were available to watch — feels less focused.
That there is nothing new to see here is not in the series’ disfavor. Political differences among close-quartered sitcom families go back at least as far as “All in the Family,” which had been off the air nearly a decade when Dennings was born; adult children moving in with parents or parents moving in with children (see “Lopez vs Lopez,” currently in its third season on NBC) is an old theme on television, which loves to pack as many generations into a three-walled set as possible. Formulas are formulas because they give consistent, reliable, unsurprising results.
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
