Home Improvement’s Taran Noah Smith says Patricia Richardson quit after growing tired of fighting for realism, and used equal pay as her exit.
Taran Noah Smith, who played youngest son Mark Taylor, weighed in on a recent episode of the “Outgrown” podcast about why the hit ABC sitcom stopped after eight seasons.
The 42-year-old actor, cast at age seven in 1991, said co-star Patricia Richardson grew worn down fighting to keep Jill Taylor sounding like a real mom. He said she then conditioned a ninth season on matching Tim Allen’s pay, knowing the studio would say no.
Fox News reported Smith’s account alongside Richardson’s own May 2024 remarks to the Los Angeles Times about the same exit.
Smith said the chemistry changed for the better when Richardson replaced Frances Fisher days before the pilot taped.
He recalled that Richardson had just given birth to twins and already had an older child about his age. That, he said, brought a more realistic mom energy to the set.
Before the quote, Smith put it this way on the podcast hosted by Tom Scharpling and Julia Vickerman:
“When they brought Patricia in, there was just a much better chemistry,” Smith said.
“And she had her own kid. She had just given birth to twins, and she had one older kid who was about my age. She really brought a lot more of a realistic mom energy to her, and she fought throughout the whole show to keep the show more realistic.”
Smith said she would tell the writers, “A mother would never say this,” and force changes. After the original creators left following the first couple of seasons, a new group of writer-producers took over. Few of them had kids, he said, and Monday scripts started drifting.
“It was really Pat, the mom, who fought the good fight to make it more realistic because oftentimes it would just be something that was very out of character just to sell a joke, just to set up a joke,” Smith said. “It’s like, ‘Wait, this is not what the characters are about.’”
Smith tied Allen’s lighter touch to what happened on “Roseanne,” which premiered in 1988 and shared co-creator Matt Williams.
Williams left “Roseanne” after the first season amid tensions with Roseanne Barr. Barr later gained more control and creator credit. Smith said the “Home Improvement” camera crew had been fired from “Roseanne” in a single day and moved over.
“I think Tim was overall maybe a bit worried about being a tyrant because the same creators created ‘Roseanne,’ and Roseanne took over the show and fired the creators, fired everybody,” Smith said. “So, Tim was always, I think, more hands-off with that, not wanting to be tyrannical, which meant that it was a lot more on Pat to push.”
That load, Smith argued, helped end the series.
“That’s one of the reasons why the show ended up eventually ending, because she was just tired of it, of having to fight to make it realistic all the time,” he said. “And Tim was getting far more money than she was. That was her actual way of stopping. She said she’d do a ninth season if she got paid the same amount as Tim, knowing they wouldn’t do it.”
Richardson earned four Primetime Emmy nominations as Jill opposite Allen’s Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor. “Home Improvement” ran 204 episodes from 1991 through a 1999 conclusion and ranked among the highest-rated sitcoms of the 1990s.
During the eighth season she decided it would be her last. ABC and parent Disney still floated a 25-episode ninth season. Richardson told the Los Angeles Times the offer was $1 million per episode for her and $2 million for Allen. Allen accepted right away. She did not.
“When I took the job, they said it wasn’t meant to be the Tim Allen show. It was meant to be our show,” Richardson said. “I’ve always said, I don’t want to play the thankless wife.”
She also recalled writers brushing off her notes with, “Pat, it’s not like we don’t understand women. We’re married to them.”
Her counter was equal pay plus an executive producer credit. She expected the refusal.
“I told everybody, there’s not enough money in the world to get me to do a ninth year. This show is over. It needs to end,” she said. “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.”
“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 a** off. I was a big reason why women were watching.”
Richardson also pointed to Jonathan Taylor Thomas’s departure, softer ratings, and a desire for more time with her children after divorce. She has shown no interest in a reboot.
A lead actress who refused the thankless-wife slot, forced the scripts back toward real life, and walked when the studio would not match the star’s check is not a Hollywood mystery. It is what happens when one person still cares whether the family on screen looks like a family at all.
