Zachery Ty Bryan first became famous playing the eldest son of Tim Allen on the hit ’90s ABC sitcom Home Improvement. After a few more decades of acting, mostly in TV roles, Bryan has again entered the pop culture slipstream with a widely publicized string of legal troubles.
In 2020, Bryan was arrested on charges related to domestic violence, and the following year he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts in exchange for other charges being dropped. Recently, Bryan racked up more felony assault charges when police were called to his home after a dispute between Bryan and a woman who has not been named.
There’s no word yet on whether his recent charges constitute a breach of his earlier plea deal, which also required three years of bench probation, participation in a batterer intervention program, and absolutely no contact with the 2020 abuse victim.
But beyond his legal troubles, Bryan seems to have been working steadily since Home Improvement ended in 1999, though primarily in one-off roles.
What has Zachery Ty Bryan been in besides Home Improvement?
While filming Home Improvement, Bryan appeared in several other projects, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Picket Fences, and the Sinbad-starring Disney flick First Kid — which is a nice family comedy about the trials of being the son of the U.S. president that devolves into a dark assassination plot and ends with a mass shooting at a mall. You have to see that one to believe it.
The same year that Home Improvement ended, we got our first taste of Adult Bryan in The Rage: Carrie 2. It’s a pretty bad movie, but at least it shows a host of toxic men getting brutally sectioned by flying CDs and stuff. Bryan continued landing TV roles in the years following, including a few supporting bids on Touched by an Angel, ER, Boston Public, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and Veronica Mars.
In 2006, he appeared in two films: Annapolis and the underrated Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Although Bryan seemed primed to finally break into films for the long term, he was never able to step out of the supporting actor box that most casting directors seemed to visualize around him.
So, it was back to TV work on series like Burn Notice and the Knight Rider reboot. His final credit (so far) appears to have been last year’s The Guardians of Justice, which is a mixed-media sendup of DC comics and the Justice League that incorporates both live-action and animation in its presentation. Bryan is credited for all seven episodes that streamed on Netflix.
We’ll have to see if any of Bryan’s recent legal troubles put a stop to his career. They sometimes don’t for white men; then again, Bryan doesn’t have the influence he once had as the son of Tim the Toolman Taylor.
Tim Allen could not be reached for comment, because we didn’t feel like calling him.
