Flat ‘Tires’

On May 23, the Shane Gillis sitcom Tires premiered on Netflix. It is absolute and complete garbage that made me lose four hours of my life that I will never get back. For reasons that only some alien or probably the smartest guy in the planet, physicist and mathematician Edward Witten, could understand and even explain, Netflix pre-renewed Tires for a second season two days before it actually appeared. Tires is like the poor, low-budget, almost homemade and unfunny version of The Office, whose one and only achievement is to make something like Trailer Park Boys as gripping, complex and profound as The Brothers Karamazov. But, I repeat, two days before its premiere Neflix renewed it for a second season that I promise myself I will never see. Because it sucks so bad!

Damn, Shane Gillis, I think that was a bit extreme. Sorry.

You could say Gillis is a pioneer. But he’s a pioneer of weird things that happen to hardly anyone. And obviously we should mentioned and remembered that he was one of the first to suffer from the “cancel culture” thing. Back in 2019, when without being, let’s say, a really famous comedian, he managed to score big and surprise Lorne Michaels. After a killer audition, he went straight into the cast of Saturday Night Live. Pretty cool, right?

Well, the joy would only last a week, as SNL fired him after a reporter did his Good Samaritan job and destroyed Shane’s dreams by targeting the spotlight on an old episode of the highly-regarded podcast Gillis had at the time, along with comedian Matt McCusker, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast (they should have kept it more secret), which was a hit on the Patreon platform. During those three minutes, the comedians said some very funny things that no comedian should say anymore because it can cost you your career. Gillis disappeared from SNL without even appearing in an episode. But everything has worked out much more than fine: A 2023 Netflix special (Beautiful Dogs) and even in February of this year he made a triumphant return to SNL as a host. And now…Tires!

Comedy without comedy

‘Tires’ is a six-episode show about a chain of car repair store. The main character is Will (Steve Gerben), son of the owner and heir to something that seems to be potentially destined for bankruptcy. Will is an idiot, generates no interest, lacks humor or sharp dialogue, and as a character he only brings meaningless chaos to the table when trying to create new ideas for the business. Also, Will suffers from the bullying of his cousin Shane (Shane Gillis) who is one of the workers, a mechanic? Who knows. In fact, you never know during the six episodes if they even can change a tire.

I like Gillis’ comedy and on May 23, I watched the first season very early in the morning. I hadn’t even had breakfast. In total, the sum of minutes of the six episodes is 122 minutes. I didn’t laugh even once. I thought it was because I didn’t have breakfast. So I had breakfast and re-watched all six episodes. Still no laughs. The series looks cheap (poor lighting, and poor art direction). Everything takes place on the same set, which is very small, and with the saturation of attempts at sexual humor, and semi-scatological jokes.

Without fully understanding what each character represents, it generates  an uncomfortable claustrophobic atmosphere. I told myself, man, Netflix should have put a little more money into this so it wouldn’t look… like that. But the story is that Gillis financed this first season himself. He’d already made a pilot of this series with the same cast and placed it on YouTube a couple of years ago.

Chris O’Connor. Kilah Fox and Stavros Halkias complete the cast, with John McKeever directing. The characters don’t say funny things and funny things don’t happen. In one episode, customers arrived for an oil-change promotion. Our heroes wrote on a whiteboard which one to serve first: the Chinese guy, the MILF or the white-trash couple.  For some reason, which I imagine is where the fun it is supposed to be, they can’t pick who will be the first to get the oil change.

Then, in another episode, in a desperate attempt to make some profit, they decide to open a bikini car wash. And out of nowhere several women appear, friends of the receptionist. But we don’t know if they’re there for free or if they’ll charge: we don’t know anything, except that one of them has sex with Will and the big problem, the big conflict of the next episode is that Will arrives at work smelling like her intimate fluids. Look, I’m not asking for award-worthy scripts, but.. Bikini car wash? Pussy smell? Shame on you, Shane! Why drop the bar so low?