Allen Firm On Quitting ‘Home’

The question gave Tim Allen plenty of wiggle room. He didn’t wiggle.

Would it be accurate to say, he was asked, that there is nothing Disney/ABC could say or offer that could persuade him to do another year of his once top-rated and still formidable “Home Improvement” series?

“Yes,” Allen replied.

Which is pretty much exactly what he has said a number of times of late. But ABC and its parent company, Disney, don’t seem to be hearing him.

“They have their agenda that is layers deep, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing,” Allen said. “I don’t know how many ways I can say this: I’m not going to do this anymore.”

Co-star Patricia Richardson echoed Allen’s sentiments. “There’s nothing I could imagine at this point (that could make me change my mind),” she said. “So they’d have to be a lot more creative than I am.”

Richardson said that the work on “Home Improvement” has been extremely hard this year. The number of really terrific episodes compared to just average ones has been falling, she said, and there has been a lot of “fighting over scripts.

“I was the first one to say that this is the last year,” she said. “We had a meeting (last summer), and we planned the last episode.”

The taping of that show is set for April 9, although the final script hasn’t been written yet.