Home Improvement star Taran Noah Smith is looking back on TV mom Patricia Richardson’s exit from the beloved sitcom.
“She had just given birth to twins, and she had one older kid who was about my age. And she really brought a lot more of a realistic mom [energy],” Smith, 42, said during a resurfaced episode of “Outgrown” podcast episode. “She fought throughout the whole show to keep the show more realistic and tell the writers, ‘a mother would never say this’ and get them to change it.”
Smith starred on Home Improvement as Mark, the youngest member of the Taylor family. In addition to Smith and Richardson, 75, who portrayed matriarch Jill Taylor, the cast included Tim Allen as patriarch Tim, Zachery Ty Bryan as Brad and Johnathan Taylor Thomas as Randy.
Home Improvement ran for eight seasons from 1991 to 1998. However, Smith claimed that things started to change behind the scenes after a new group of writers and producers were brought in after “the first couple of seasons.”
“The original creators only did the show for the first couple of seasons and then they moved on. They brought in a whole other group of writers/producers,” he said. “And of those guys, very few of them had kids and the show started to go in a different direction … It was really Pat, the mom, who fought the good fight to make it more realistic.”
Smith claimed that the new staff would write lines that felt “out of character” just to “set up a joke.” He added that Allen, 73, didn’t want to rock the boat when it came to working with the writing staff while Richardson still wanted the story to be believable.
“Tim was always more hands off and not wanting to be tyrannical which meant that [there] was a lot more on Pat to push,” he claimed. “That’s one of the reasons why the show ended up eventually ending. She was tired of it and having to fight to make it realistic all the time.”
Smith also acknowledged the pay discrepancies between Allen and Richardson were another reason why she declined to return for a ninth season.
“Tim was getting far more money than she was,” Smith said. “And that was her actual way of stopping. She was like, ‘She’ll do a ninth season if she got paid the same amount as Tim.’”
Richardson has been candid over the years about not receiving the same compensation as Allen to continue Home Improvement.
“I knew that Disney would in no way pay me that much. That was my way to say ‘no’ and was a little bit of a flip-off to Disney,” the actress said in a May 2024 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I’d been there all this time, and they never even paid me a third of what Tim was making, and I was working my ass off. I was a big reason why women were watching.”
