Crime
The Beast in Me
Netflix’s ‘The Beast in Me” is aptly named, since families will need to grapple with a beast made up of content issues when watching it.
Tim Allen and Kat Dennings are both sitcom stars—he from such shows as Home Improvement and Last Man Standing, she from the long-running 2 Broke Girls. Those recognizable actors co-produce and head the cast of Shifting Gears, a show from ABC (streaming the next day on Hulu) that debuted in January of this year.
Allen plays Matt Parker, the adamantly headstrong owner of a “Restomod” shop that turns used junkers into automotive works of art. Matt is a guy with, let’s say, a few opinions about the stuff of life. And his employees—the amiable and somewhat clueless mechanic, Gabe, and his quick-witted, wheelchair-using coworker, Stitch—know when to chip into a conversation with a quippy comeback and when to simply grin and bear it.
The only real drawback to Matt’s measured and well-tooled life is the fact that his beloved wife passed away several years back, a loss that still weighs on him.
Oh, and there’s one more thing: his estranged daughter, Riley.
Riley saluted her dad with a signature, dual-hand gesture when she stormed out his front door at 18. She was supposed to become a lawyer and have a big career. Instead, she got pregnant right out of high school and ran off to Las Vegas with her musician boyfriend.
Now, however, Riley returns home with two kids in tow (Carter and Georgia) and an ugly divorce under her belt. She even wheels in driving Matt’s prized Pontiac GTO that she happened to, uh, slightly steal when she left. Although she reports that the car is still driving very well.
Matt nods and declares, “When I build stuff, it’s built to last.”
To which Riley retorts, “Except our relationship.”
Now, you might find that a rather inauspicious beginning to a discussion about Riley and her kids moving in with Matt. But arguing banter is Matt and Riley’s typical stock-in-trade. After the two bounce off one another for several minutes—while everyone else takes cover—it’s agreed that Riley and her clan can stay until she gets back on her feet.
“Mom’s death was a wake-up call,” Riley says. And Matt can’t argue with that. He also can’t argue with everything his wife would have said at this moment if she were still there: the responsibility she would have said he had.
This new arrangement won’t always be easy—as Riley figures out how to talk with her dad and Matt learns how to be a dad and grandfather—but it’s necessary. After all, it appears that everyone in this newly reunited family needs to shift a few gears.
Shifting Gears pulls its humor from Odd Couple-like interplay over Matt’s conservative leanings and Riley’s liberal viewpoints and then draws in the car shop’s employees for occasional badinage. And those humor threads weave into interactions with the younger family members as well. (Such as dealing with school relationships and Gramps giving driving lessons.)
That combination opens up avenues for humorous and sometimes touching family moments that Shifting Gears includes in its formula.
In an interview about the show, Tim Allen mentioned his desire to delve deeper into an exploration of “grief with a sense of humor.” And the sitcom exemplifies that pursuit through comedic monologues and happenstance meetups at the grave of Matt’s wife, niche in a mausoleum.
Now, that’s not to imply that Shifting Gears deserves a full pedal-to-the-metal approach from family audiences. The show motors in with fairly middle-of-the-road and occasionally grin-worthy banter between Allen’s gruff, common-sense dad and Dennings’ sarcastically quippy daughter. But it can slip and slide into some less-than-family-friendly content now and again that includes sex-oriented winks, toilet humor and harsh language. And the opening episode of Season 2 suggests that Matt’s sex life may become a more prevalent theme in the future.
Like most sitcoms, the heart and humor will keep audiences engaged; but those content concerns could cause some traffic jams at home.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
After sharing a kiss at the end of Season 1, Matt is unsure how to proceed with a relationship with Eve, the dance studio owner.
Even though his wife passed away years ago, Matt still feels like he’d be cheating. He visits his wife’s grave to talk it out. There, he runs into past acquaintance Charlotte, who suggests he join her at a grief support group to talk with others struggling with similar issues.
Meanwhile, Riley is trying to avoid texts from Gabe, the mechanic at her dad’s shop. While she pretended to be asleep after getting drunk at her divorce party, Gabe had said he had feelings for her. And she dreads a conversation on the topic.
In addition, Riley spots Matt coming in late after his grief meeting and begins teasing him about having a secret sexual affair with an unknown woman. And she spills that secret to her boss, Eve.
The show is rife with jokes about unmarried sexual trysts, sex, orgies, strip clubs, underwear and getting drunk. A dance instructor, Amelie, wears a tight, cropped-top dance outfit. Matt and Eve kiss. And there are multiple misuses of God’s name and the profanities “d–mit,” “d–n” and “b–ch.”
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
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