EXCLUSIVE: Tim Allen and Bill Maher Blame DEI in Shows and Diversity for Death of Sitcoms — 'Not Everything Has to Look Like Angelina Jolie's Christmas Card'

Tim Allen and Bill Maher got into a spirited discussion about how DEI rules have affected creativity and destroyed sitcoms, with the Real Time host making a snarky comment about Angelina Jolie's "rainbow family" of children from different races, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

Maher, 69, complimented Allen, 72, on his longevity as a sitcom star, with such successes as Home Improvement and Last Man Standing to his name. That's when things took a very controversial turn.

"You're one of the few people who's made it stick, boy," Maher gushed to his guest's list of hits on the Monday, January 5 episode of his Club Random podcast.

"Somebody told me I was like the Tom Brady of sitcoms. When they asked me to do a third one, I said, ‘I thought they were kidding,'" Allen said, as he's now starring in the ABC family comedy Shifting Gears.

The Toy Story star thought it would be too difficult to cast these days.

"I don't know whether my generation, because all the people that I know that I would make it with are either dead or not the right gender, you know, they're all light-skinned European older men, and that doesn't fit the DEI thing that everybody wanted. They wanted, you know, a potpourri of..." Allen continued before Maher interjected, "DEI in the cast," referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion rules.

"I didn't want to get into that. I didn't want to patronize people," The Santa Clause star said about how he was reluctant to go in the DEI direction. "If you're going to do a sitcom, it's just got to be funny. "

"I couldn't agree more. Diversity is a great virtue. It's not the only virtue. And not everything in America has to look like Angelina Jolie's Christmas card," Maher quipped at how Jolie's self-described "rainbow family" has two adopted Southeast Asian sons, an adopted Ethiopian daughter, and three biological children with ex-husband Brad Pitt.

"And it's always okay in reverse. You know, it's like if there's something where it's just an all-black cast and good, I'm all for it. I'm not complaining about it," Maher noted.

"I'm just saying, you know, CBS put in the law from the union, I guess it came down a few years ago, that like every writing staff had to be 50 percent people of color," the HBO host said of the network's rule initiated in 2020 to have half of all writing staffs be non-white by the 2022-23 season.

"And I thought, what if the show they're writing is about a polka band in a ski town," Maher joked about how the premise seemed so inherently white.