US conservative sitcom Last Man Standing is being resurrected by Fox. The furore over its cancellation shows the right wingers are a bunch of snowflakes

You have to feel for American conservatives.

They might have their man in the White House, control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and 33 of the 50 state governorships (34 of the 51 if you count Britain as the 51st state). They might have more money than God, the loyal support of business, a system set up to favour them in myriad ways. But they don’t have a comedy to call their own. At least not since Roseanne was cancelled on account of its star’s fondness for racism.

Those who still tune in to US network television in preference to Netflix are thus left with an unremitting diet of radical liberalism; I’m thinking of the hard left politics of, say, the Big Bang Theory, or its offshoot Young Sheldon.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that about a traditional, religious, football-loving Texan family and its boy genius son? But the narrator Jim Parsons is gay. So it must be liberal.

At the end of the month, however, some balance will finally be restored to the force thanks to the good folks at Fox resurrecting Last Man Standing, which will reappear after a year’s hiatus. It used to air on ABC but a dastardly liberal conspiracy meant it was curtailed after only six seasons and 130 episodes.

It’s worth taking a look at this story, because it shows how sad and pathetic the American right wing has become. Dwight D Eisenhower must be turning in his grave.

For the uninitiated (readers on this side of the pond can check it out on Five Star if they really want to), Last Man Standing focuses on Mike Baxter (Tim Allen), a traditional, old school “man’s man” living in a house full of more or less liberated modern women, namely his wife and three daughters.

He gets his “guy time” at Outdoor Man, the sporting and outdoor goods emporium he works at (think hunting, fishing and guns), which he helped turn into a chain as an executive alongside its similarly traditional boss.

The premise is scarcely original and the show is about as challenging as a warm bath. If bad TV is where you go to turn your brain off, that might, I suppose, explain its relative success and longevity in the face of a chilly reaction from critics.

The only edge is provided by Mike Baxter’s robustly conservative views, which he often expounds upon in a vlog that doubles as a marketing exercise for Outdoor Man, or in rows with his cliched caricature of a liberal son-in-law, the vegan Buddhist Ryan.

It’s hardly groundbreaking stuff.

Tim Allen, perhaps best known for his role as Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story films, once declared that “we’re going to drill Hillary” before the start of the fifth season.

Here’s an example of that in action:

“Wow. Hillary Clinton’s asking us for money. Will her string of mistakes never end?” says Mike.

“The hits keep on coming, but she’ll never top Benghazi. That’s her ‘Stairway to Heaven’,” says the similarly conservative youngest daughter Eve.

“Yeah, that’s the kind of screw-up that happens when you spend all your free time deleting emails.”

Oh, and guess what, she was fond of Wall Street moneymen and her husband Bill slept around.

Cutting edge it ain’t. Liberals do a far better job skewering other liberals. Watch Jon Stewart if you don’t believe me.

But it seems Allen is about as good as it gets in conservative humour: when ABC swung the axe it sparked an outrage that went all the way up to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. You’d think he would have better things to do, but he found time amid his busy schedule to accuse ABC of “playing politics”. Glenn Beck cried. Petitions were circulated. The one on Change.org racked up more than 400,000 signatures. There was even a call for a boycott – isn’t that what liberals are always getting criticised for doing?

Let’s get down to the truth of the matter. Allen is himself an outspoken conservative who has frequently skirted the line that Roseanne Barr crossed. Perhaps the most notable occasion was when he compared being a conservative in Hollywood to being Jewish in 1930s Germany. Yep, a man who gets paid millions of dollars for fronting his own show likened his experience to that of a people who were ostracised, beaten up and harassed prior to the launch of an industrial programme of extermination.

It is possible that this, and other incidents, gave ABC pause for thought. There is such a thing as brand contamination.

But the biggest concern of networks is cash. At a time when it was reworking its schedule (Friday is now drama night), would the economics of the show stack up in another slot?

Here’s why ABC decided that no was the answer: it didn’t own the show, which is produced by Fox Studios. The demographics of the admittedly sizeable audience also skew older (hardly surprising for a conservative show), making it less attractive to advertisers. And Allen was up for a new contract, which usually involves a pay rise, further increasing the cost.

So what really killed Last Man Standing was the free market, something conservatives like Mike Baxter/Tim Allen are supposed to cheer on and support, and tell others to suck it up when it bites them.

Fox presumably thought it could make the economics of the show work, and maybe Allen could fit better with its brand. If that’s the case, more power to it.

Who knows, the show might now get better writers. They could try and make it interesting by examining how liberals and conservatives could communicate in a humorous manner. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up, not with a star like Tim Allen.

I’ve read some of its critics saying the show sends out a bad message in Trump’s America. What might console them, amid one more season of cheap jibes and otherwise tiresomely old fashioned humour, is that it’s at least easier to stomach than the whinging, bellyaching and conspiracy theorising from the right’s army of snowflakes when it was off the air.

I wonder if Outdoor Man sells a good mac? They’re a real pain in the ass when they melt.