Being a manly man in today’s world is very difficult. Nobody listens to your rants, nobody respects your opinions, and when it canceled Last Man Standing, ABC cruelly took away the one TV show you could count on to present the world in a way that connects with your proud, conservative values. It would be enough to make a manly man cry, if a manly man could actually do something as pathetic as that.
Manly men all across the country really are utterly heartbroken at the loss of Last Man Standing, but they’re stuffing down their tears and putting that sorrow to a more “practical” use. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, over 50,000 Last Man Standing fans have signed a Change.org petition asking ABC to give the show another chance, and the manly men are threatening to boycott ABC if they don’t get their way. The petition makes its case by explaining that the show “appeals to a broad swath of Americans who find very few shows that extol the virtues with which they can identify; namely conservative values,” which is definitely a way that real people talk and write.
It goes on to say that Last Man Standing wasn’t all about politics, though, since some of the characters were “clearly of the liberal persuasion” but they still got along with star Tim Allen’s manly man character. On the other hand, maybe this is all about politics, because the petition adds that Last Man Standing “[was] one of the only shows on broadcast television, and the only sitcom, that [was] not constantly shoving liberal ideals down the throats of the viewers.” The petition writer even theorizes that the show’s refusal to shovel liberal ideals down its viewers’ throats was “the real reason” it got canceled.
Of course, the liberal snobs in the mainstream media would probably point out that the show got canceled because of its ratings, with Entertainment Weekly noting that—despite pulling 8.1 million viewers per episode in its final season—it only managed to hold about a 1.6 rating in the all-important 18-49 demographic. In other words, a reasonable number of people watched the show every week, but they weren’t the sort of people that advertisers or TV networks care about. To put an even finer point on it, ABC didn’t really care what the people who were watching Last Man Standing thought when it was on, and it’s probably not going to care about this petition/boycott now that the show is canceled.