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Aaron Kirk
Professor Beth Olson
Media and Society
9 November 2014
Last Man Standing – Filed Project #4
Last Man Standing is a television sitcom starring Tim Allen as Mike Baxter, a middle-
aged father of three daughters. The show currently airs Friday evenings on ABC. It premiered on
October 11, 2011 and is on its fourth season. The series has been reasonably successful thus far,
with nearly 13 million viewers of the first season’s premiere (Gorman). Additionally, in 2012,
the series was nominated for a People’s Choice Award for “Favorite New TV Comedy.”
The episodes I chose to analyze are “Sinkhole,” “School Merger,” “Mike Advises
Mandy,” and “Hot Shots,” all from season four. In my analysis, I will primarily focus on how the
character’s observed behaviors and positions provide implicit and explicit commentary on
gender, as well as some of the stereotypes each character helps to perpetuate. I will also discuss
how these things may affect the audience of the program, as well as the somewhat interesting
target audience of the advertising.
First, the patriarch of the family: Mike Baxter, played by Tim Allen. It is quite obvious,
almost from frame one, what cultural caricature this character falls under: that of the rich, white,
Republican male (Thomas and Wilcox 115). A successful executive of the “Outdoor Man”
sporting good stores, Mike takes almost every opportunity possible – 63% of his interactions in
these four episodes in my estimation – to offer conservative political and social commentary. In
“Mike Advises Mandy” for example, he takes something as seemingly reasonable as one of his
employees asking for help, and turns it into a rant about how “help is sometimes just enabling.

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Democrats love enabling poor people.” Much of the show’s humor derives from the premise of a
right-of-center, overly masculine man living in a house with four women, which creates obvious
gender clashes (Jackson 173). Feeling somewhat trapped in his female-dominated home, Mike
usually gets out his animated nature through videos he produces for his company. No fan of
feminism, Mike declares in one video that he wants “a world where women can do everything a
man can do…and just don’t want to.”
Mike’s three daughters – Kristen, played by Amanda Fuller, Mandy, played by Molly
Ephraim, and Eve, played by Kaitlyn Dever – each support particular stereotypes, and the levels
of success (or lack thereof) each one enjoys provide implicit social commentary.
Kristen, the oldest of the three, is a politically liberal feminist who seeks to raise her son
Boyd as differently from how Mike raised her as possible. In “School Merger” for example, she
has Boyd put on an all-black costume and declares that he is “a lump of coal…the single greatest
threat to life on our planet.” Much like Mike, however, she is rarely short on ideological
interjections; of the 13 interactions she has in these four episodes, seven involve her
paraphrasing left-wing talking points. She is agnostic, strongly against corporal punishment, and
refuses to vaccinate Boyd in “Hot Shots.” Thusly, it is plausible to interpret her character as
falling in line with the Hipster/New Age stereotype, though this caricature is not as socially well-
defined as Mike’s (Hakanson 246).
Mandy, the middle daughter, is perhaps the most obviously stereotypical character in the
series. She is beautiful, but essentially clueless and ignorant. Constantly glued to her phone, she
refuses to show interest in anything unless it is popular with social media. She humorously
remarks in “Sinkhole” that if “it’s not trending on twitter, it doesn’t exist!” The series plays off
her ignorance for humor in a whopping 78% of her character interactions, portraying her as the

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stereotypical attractive girl who has everything in the body, but little in the mind (VanderMey,
Meyer, Rys, and Sebranek 15). To be fair, Mandy does excel at what little she does care about;
she has operated her own clothing business since season three.
And finally we have Eve: the youngest, the most successful for her age, and by far the
most similar to her father in comparison to the other two. Something of a tomboy, Eve plays
sports, is a member of JROTC, and is a straight-A student. She and Mike have arguably the
closest bond of any two characters in the series, and they share identical political views. She
frequently takes shots at Mandy – in 12 instances to be exact – mocking her for her general
cluelessness and somewhat promiscuous nature. A humorous example of this occurs when
Mandy arranges to help run the voting polls for a local election. Eve quips that “Mandy’s
working the poll…I think we all saw that coming!”
We seemed to have discovered a paradigm here, whether intentional or no; the more each
daughter has in common with Mike (generally masculine qualities), the more successful she
seems to be. Kristen, the opposite of her father ideologically and politically, is a single mom and
a college dropout. Mandy, the apathetic middle ground, is a college student and operates a small
business. And Eve, the tomboy of the trio, is an overachieving conservative high school student
bound for West Point. By this conjecture, the behaviors of each character suggests that the more
similar to a man a woman becomes, the more successful she is likely to be.
Of course, this is just a television comedy; gender clashes are why the humor works, and
it is highly unlikely that the writers have any genuine agenda they are trying to push.
Nevertheless, the behaviors and qualities of each daughter in comparison to Mike make an
interesting television case study, and may reveal implicit cultural prejudices present in all of us.

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What effects might the displayed behaviors and stereotypes have on the audience
watching the series? In the short term, most of the audience will laugh. And those who do not –
either because they are offended or because they simply do not find the series entertaining – will
change the channel or the streamer to something else. From a fairly generic sitcom, not much
else can be expected.
When it comes to longer-lasting effects, it gets less clear-cut. Some research suggests that
passive forms of entertainment, like comedies, show little long-term effects on participants
(Sayre and King 128). Assuming there are some in the case of Last Man Standing, they will
likely consist of either reinforcing the audience’s existing social constructs – such as the
implication from Mandy’s character that beauty and brains may be mutually exclusive – or,
inversely, persuading them that those constructs may be unfounded. The show provides a
reasonable balance in the objects of humor, which will most likely lead to most long-term
viewers simply accepting the parts they agree with and dismissing the portions with which they
do not.
Lastly, the target audience of most of the advertising is noteworthy. There are a number
of generally negative female stereotypes that the series uses for humor, but that apparently hasn’t
deterred women from watching the program. With the exception of the network’s advertising of
its other shows, almost all of the commercials I saw played were targeted at a female audience.
Ads for Maybelline makeup, Modern Muse perfume, and Kellogg’s Special K were the
highlights. The exceptions to this rule were largely generic: commercials for Sprint’s iPhone 6
service plan, Old Navy’s upcoming sales, and tickets to Disneyland. These suggest an
advertising target of young middle-class parents looking to affordably clothe their children,
enjoy family time together at an amusement park, and stay connected.

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Works Cited
Gorman, Bill. "Tuesday Final Ratings: 'Last Man,' 'NCIS,' '90210,' 'Dancing' Adjusted Up;
'Ringer,' 'Body Of Proof' Adjusted Down." TVbytheNumbers. The Nielsen Company, 12
Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.
Hackanson, Jonah. Wild Touchless Beasts: American Postmodernism and Millennial Psychosis.
Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2014. Print.
Jackson, Jane. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication.
London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Sayre, Shay, and Cynthia King. Entertainment and Society, 2nd Edition: Influences, Impacts, and
Innovations. London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Thomas, Sue, and Clyde Wilcox. Women and Elective Office: Past, Present, and Future. Oxford,
United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print.
VanderMey, Randall, Verne Meyer, John V. Rys, and Partick Sebranek. The College Writer: A
Guide to Thinking, Writing, and Researching, Brief. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning,
2014. Print.