Is There Anything Worse Than Tim Allen’s Anti-Pot ‘Home Improvement’ Episode?
The 1990s clearly experienced no shortage of awkward tries to refashion current Tv plans into condescending parables about the hazards of prescription drugs and alcohol, as evidenced by the conspicuously beer-centric episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the time Jessie from Saved by the Bell couldn’t cover The Pointer Sisters since she was too hopped up on caffeine drugs.
But arguably, TV’s worst, most insulting “very special” anti-drug episode arrived from the exact guy who both saved Xmas and allegedly randomly flashed feminine co-stars: Tim Allen.
Dwelling Enhancement’s “What a Drag” opens with Tim and Jill Taylor getting a bag of pot stashed in their gazebo. Fairly than create an open dialogue with their young children about recreational drug use, they instead make your mind up to stake out their individual residence from a neighbor’s yard, spying on the a few kids with a periscope. At some point, they find out that the weed belongs to their eldest, Brad, who they progress to berate as if he’d just been caught kicking John Wick’s pet to demise.
Clearly, a lot of anti-drug articles from this era is absurdly hysterical now — lest we forget the time Kermit the Frog and ALF attempted to scare a teen straight — but House Advancement’s preachy melodramatic just take appears to be in particular reprehensible in hindsight. For starters, the elephant created of cocaine in the space is Allen’s very own historical past with medications. Famously, Allen was arrested for drug trafficking in 1978 and received a lighter prison sentence after narcing on all his seller buddies. Listening to about why you shouldn’t do medication from Allen is a little like finding a lecture about the benefit of nutrition from the Hamburglar.
This did not go uncommented on at the time, possibly. “I’ve experienced a historical past with this, but Tim Taylor is distinct,” Allen told reporters in 1998, despite the fact that he “declined comment on his own encounters with medications and liquor.” He did confess that the team of Home Improvement was break up on the problem: “Some of our writers are from the 1960s, and they just really do not consider marijuana is that major a offer. But we have other writers who are real puritanical about it.”
The Taylors sooner or later understand their individual hypocrisy to some degree for the reason that Jill used to be a pothead. Which is suitable, Allen enable the writers give his Television wife a sordid record with medications when his fictional surrogate remained absolutely thoroughly clean. Tim Taylor says on the show that he in no way smoked pot because he was “a beerhead.” Rather undermining the whimsy of that line, Allen was arrested for driving beneath the affect the earlier spring.
In the end, Jill tells Brad a harrowing tale of how she smoked a joint laced with “something” at a Led Zeppelin concert, ended up in the unexpected emergency place, and afterwards jail — a horror story that mostly ignores the experiences of all the stoners who experienced a tremendous-great time at that Zeppelin clearly show. The Taylors then follow up their much more honest discussion about the evils of cannabis by threatening to submit their son to random urine exams should really he at any time check out pot once more.
Unbelievably, this episode was criticized at the time for earning the Taylors seem also lenient, presumably due to the fact it did not incorporate any scenes in which Brad is individually roughed up by Nancy Reagan and McGruff the Crime Puppy.
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