One of the biggest sitcoms of the 1990s might have lasted another season if star Patricia Richardson had received a pay raise.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on Friday, the 73-year-old actress, who played Jill Taylor on “Home Improvement,” revealed that the sitcom was ended after ABC refused to pay her the same salary as co-star Tim Allen.
Richardson told the paper that she decided during production of season 8 that she didn’t want to continue on the show for several reasons, including wanting to spend more time with her children, but ABC offered her $1 million per episode to return for season 9, and Allen was due to be paid $2 million, she said.
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Allen reportedly accepted the offer, but Richardson wasn’t interested. “I told everyone they didn’t have enough money to keep me on for a ninth year,” she said. “The show’s over. It needs to end.” So she asked ABC to give her the same terms Allen had reportedly been offered: $2 million per episode and an executive producer credit. But she was convinced ABC would turn her down, and so it was.
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“I knew Disney would never pay me that,” she recalled to The Times. “It was my way of saying ‘no,’ a little insult to Disney. I’d been there my whole life and they hadn’t paid me a third of what Tim was making. I’d worked so (expletive) hard. I was a big reason women were going to see the movie.”
Previously, Richardson had said she was denied a producer credit on the show, despite having creative input into her characters and episodes, while Allen became an executive producer in season six.
USA TODAY has reached out to Allen and representatives from ABC for comment.
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“Home Improvement” ended as one of the decade’s most popular sitcoms after eight seasons on ABC in May 1999. During filming of the series finale, Richardson told The Times that Allen “made me feel terrible and like the bad guy because I said no, leave me alone, and he was upset that I left.” Richardson added that she is no longer in contact with Allen.
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In March, Richardson said on the “Back to the Best” podcast that he had no interest in a “Home Improvement” reboot and found it “weird” to see Allen publicly discussing the possibility.
“I had heard Tim come out publicly and say that everyone was for a Home Improvement reunion,” she recalled, “but he never asked me or Jonathan[Taylor Thomas]who I talk to a lot. So I called Jonathan one day and I said, ‘Did he ask you about this?’ And he said, ‘No, but why does he say everyone’s for it and he hasn’t told you or me?'”
She added: “It won’t be a show at all. People think we’ll magically go back to who we were 30 years ago and do a show from 30 years ago, but I think we’ve all changed so much since then, which is very strange.”
Contributor: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY
