LAST MAN STANDING FINAL EPISODE SERIES
LAST MAN STANDING FINAL EPISODE TV

I didn’t want people to walk away thinking they just did a show about a truck being stolen for the final show that’s odd. So those kind of things, what we wanted to do was just make certain that when we got to the memorial scene, that people were picking up on the fact that this was a metaphor. That’s a friendly poke at them because they couldn’t have been better to us. And then “stupid, stupid network.” We love the network, by the way. The “improving his home” joke was Matt’s, which we loved. You know, “Neil’s son took this thing off.” We had a bunch of stuff and we pulled it back a little to just a couple of the good jokes. For a while, we were going to accuse that guy Neil, up the street, that his son’s a bad guy. But I don’t want to take them out of the story either. Look, most of the meta stuff is usually for the writers and the actors and hopefully the audience enjoys it. The finale includes a lot of winks to “Last Man Standing” changing networks and Allen’s old sitcom,”Home Improvement,” with lines about how the truck’s GPS can’t be tracked because it’s “off the network” and they could try “another network,” and how long Mike has been doing “improvement on this home.” How did you decide to what degree you wanted to make those references? But yeah, that was a creative decision driven by the realities of production. And I think that was a punch that really landed that scene nicely. Not that he didn’t have it with the rest of the crew and everything, but I think he felt very fatherly to Kaitlyn. Tim and Kaitlyn have always had such a special relationship. 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. 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.

LAST MAN STANDING FINAL EPISODE 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.

LAST MAN STANDING FINAL EPISODE TV

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Last man standing final episode