Whatever happened to the kids from Home Improvement

Three child actors — Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Zachery Ty Bryan, and Taran Noah Smith — played the Taylor sons on ABC’s Home Improvement from 1991 to 1999, becoming some of the most recognisable young faces on American television before their paths diverged sharply in adulthood.

TL;DR

• Jonathan Taylor Thomas left the show in 1998 to study at Harvard and Columbia, directed TV episodes, and has lived almost entirely out of the public eye since 2016.
• Zachery Ty Bryan has faced repeated legal difficulties, including domestic violence convictions and DUI arrests, and was sentenced in early 2026 to 19 months in an Oregon jail for violating probation.
• Taran Noah Smith quit acting at 16, went through a legal dispute with his parents over his trust fund, and now works at SpaceX as a sea recovery technician.
• All eight seasons of Home Improvement are available in the UK on Disney+.

For eight seasons, Home Improvement was one of the most-watched sitcoms in the United States. It averaged more than 17 million viewers per episode at its peak and earned Tim Allen a Golden Globe for his lead performance as Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor. The three Taylor boys — Brad, Randy, and Mark — grew up on screen across 204 episodes. For fans who watched every week, these were familiar faces. What those fans could not predict was how differently each young actor would handle life once the cameras stopped rolling.

Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Randy Taylor): books, directing, and deliberate silence

Of the three, Jonathan Taylor Thomas had the highest profile during the show’s run. His face appeared on the covers of teen magazines, and he voiced young Simba in Disney’s The Lion King in 1994. He left Home Improvement before its final season in 1998 — notably skipping the series finale — to pursue his education.

“I never took the fame too seriously. It was a great period in my life, but it doesn’t define me.”— Jonathan Taylor Thomas, speaking to People magazine, 2013

Thomas enrolled at Harvard University in 2000, spending his third year abroad at the University of St Andrews in Scotland — the same institution attended at the same time by Prince William and the future Princess of Wales. He later transferred to Columbia University’s School of General Studies and graduated in 2010 with a degree in philosophy and history.

His return to screens was cautious and brief. Between 2013 and 2015, he guest-starred in several episodes of Last Man Standing, reuniting with Tim Allen on ABC. He also directed three episodes of the same series between 2013 and 2016, fulfilling a goal he had spoken about publicly as far back as 1996.

Since his final Last Man Standing directing credit, he has made no further on-screen or behind-camera appearances. In 2017, he was elected to the national board of SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood trade union representing approximately 160,000 workers, and was re-elected in 2019. It remains his most visible public role. Rare paparazzi sightings in Los Angeles — most recently in late 2023 — still circulate on social media within hours of publication.

Zachery Ty Bryan (Brad Taylor): from the set to the courts

Bryan played Brad Taylor, the eldest and most athletic of the three brothers, for all eight series. After Home Improvement ended he worked steadily, with credits on Smallville, Veronica Mars, Boston Public, and the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. He also moved into film production. In a 2018 Access Hollywood interview he described the sitcom’s filming environment warmly, saying of his castmates: “We were like brothers. We either loved or hated each other.”

In the years since, Bryan’s name has largely appeared in court reports rather than entertainment coverage. He was first arrested for domestic violence in Oregon in October 2020. A second domestic violence arrest followed in Eugene, Oregon, in July 2023, after which he was charged with two counts of fourth-degree assault. One charge was later dismissed. In place of a sentence of 19 to 20 months in the Oregon Department of Corrections, he was ordered to serve three years of probation.

Bryan also faced drink-driving charges. He was arrested in California in February 2024 on a felony DUI charge and again in Oklahoma in October 2024 after declining to take a roadside sobriety test. A Lane County probation officer subsequently noted that his November 2025 arrest marked his fifth arrest within 26 months of his supervision period, three of which were for driving under the influence. The officer recommended that the full custodial sentence be reinstated. In early 2026, a judge sentenced Bryan to 19 months in an Oregon jail for violating the terms of his domestic violence probation. He appeared in court virtually, already serving a 16-month sentence in California on the 2024 DUI conviction.

Taran Noah Smith (Mark Taylor): from sitcom to SpaceX

Smith was just 7 years old when Home Improvement began and 16 when it ended. He appeared in 201 of the show’s 204 episodes and won two Young Artist Awards during the run. His character famously went through a goth phase in season 7 — black nail polish, a shaved head, a dog collar — a storyline Smith revealed in a 2025 interview was inspired by the head writer’s own son, leading to what he described as “a very awkward moment” when they met on set.

Unlike his co-stars, Smith chose not to continue acting at all after the show ended. At 18 he gained control of a $1.5 million trust fund from his earnings on the series, a move that was accompanied by a legal dispute with his parents over the management of the money — a matter the family later resolved and reconciled over. In 2001, at 17, he married Heidi Van Pelt, who was 16 years his senior; they divorced in 2007. In 2005, he and his then-wife founded a vegan food business in California called Playfood. It did not survive long term.

In 2012, Smith pleaded no contest to charges of driving under the influence and marijuana possession and was placed on probation. He later co-wrote a book with his mother titled Stardom Happens: Nurturing Your Child in the Entertainment Business, published in 2015. According to his LinkedIn profile, he subsequently worked in submarine instruction, then as a flight technician at stratospheric balloon company Near Space Labs in 2022, before joining SpaceX that same year as an integration technician on the Falcon 9 programme. He has since advanced to sea recovery technician, overseeing the retrieval of ocean-splashdown rocket boosters from drone ships off the California coast. Smith made his first public media appearance in some years in November 2025, speaking to Parade and discussing his time on the show. He appeared, according to that report, to be in good spirits and firmly settled in his post-Hollywood life.

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UK angle: where to watch Home Improvement in Britain

British viewers who want to revisit the Taylor household can stream all eight seasons of Home Improvement on Disney+ in the United Kingdom and Ireland. A standard Disney+ subscription costs £4.99 per month with ads or £7.99 per month without. Individual episodes are also available to buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video. The show carries a PG certificate for its family-friendly sitcom content.

For further reading on 1990s television legacies and the performers who shaped them, see our related coverage: What happened to Janet Jackson and why she deserves better and Ted Lasso season 4 teaser drops with premiere date.

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What the three stories tell us

Home Improvement ran at a moment before social media placed child performers under constant public scrutiny. All three actors came of age in an era when stepping back from the spotlight was still possible. Thomas took that option to its logical extreme, building a private intellectual life that has kept him almost entirely out of entertainment news for a decade. Smith took a different kind of exit — trading Hollywood for technical work in aerospace, a shift that by any measure qualifies as reinvention. Bryan’s trajectory is the most troubled, and the most visible precisely because of that trouble.

The show itself has not lost its audience. Streaming data from JustWatch places it inside the top 6,000 titles in the UK as of May 2026, still moving up the charts. For a sitcom that wrapped more than 25 years ago, that is a meaningful number. Tim Allen has moved on to a new ABC series, Shifting Gears, which premiered in January 2025 and was renewed for a second season. A reboot of Home Improvement has been discussed in interviews over the years — Allen has referenced it repeatedly — but as of this writing no formal announcement has been made.

The Taylor boys, however, are unlikely to reassemble. One is quietly directing and writing in Los Angeles. One is working a technical role in the aerospace industry. And one is serving time in a county jail.