The Televangelist: The New Girl, The Last Man Standing, and Gender Relations

Each Friday in The Televangelist, Richard Clark examines the met and missed potential of television.

You don’t have to be a genius to realize that two new sitcoms, The New Girl and Last Man Standing, are for entirely different audiences. One features as its protagonist a quirky, likeable and sensitive girl who’s trying to get over a messy break-up. The other features a rugged, combative and oblivious husband and father who finds himself stranded in a sea of femininity. Both shows have a similar theme: the rise of femininity, and how men react.

While The New Girl seems at first like every man’s fantasy (oblivious cute girl shows up and wants to be roommates), in reality it is more likely every woman’s fantasy. In The New Girl, Zooey Deschanel’s character is treated not as a sex object, but purely as a friend. Magically, almost impossibly, it never occurs to her roommates to pursue her romantically or sexually – they treat her as “one of the guys”, without actually asking her to become a guy. They acknowledge her feminine qualities as part of who she is.

Tim Allen’s latest, Last Man Standing, on the other hand, seems like every man’s nightmare: one man, alone in a world that is changing and shifting around him. Everyone is insane except for him. He has a job to do in helping those around him to see the feminine errors of their ways, but no one respects that fact. For this man, life is war and women are the enemy – or at least the captives. The sitcom resolves in classic sitcom style: with everyone concluding that he was, in fact, right about pretty much everything.

The startling difference between the men in The New Girl and the lone man in Last Man Standing is the degree of actual empathy and concern that was demonstrated. In The New Girl, the roommates, as dumb and proud as they are, end up seeing Jessi as a fellow human being rather than a princess to be rescued or an enemy to be fought.

Tim Allen’s character, on the other hand, spends the whole show trying to get his way, struggling against the current and never giving in. He remains inwardly and selfishly focused throughout. He makes no concessions – he only whines when he feels something has gone “wrong”, even when those things have nothing to do with him. When the women in his life attempt to demonstrate their love for him, he either unwittingly ignores it or belittles it. These are not biblical gender roles at play.

I do believe that the Bible teaches there are inherent differences between genders, but I disagree with Last Man Standing‘s apparent thesis that one gender ought to win out over the other. Just like the three roommates in The New Girl before Jessi showed up, different types complement one another in different ways – throwing a girl in the mix doesn’t lessen that diversity, it enriches it. As adults, it’s way past time for us to climb out of the club house with the “no girls allowed” sign and start learning from one another. Women aren’t sex objects, a means to an end, or an enemy to be fought. They are equals to be learned from. They are friends.