Comedian Shane Gillis continues to have a career that defies expectations. He hosted SNL for a second time this past season, for instance, and continued to be the same sometimes-offensive, sometimes-funny presence that made him successful over the past few years. Tires, the workplace comedy he co-created, had already been picked up for a second season when the first one debuted on Netflix last year; the show has come back with double the number episodes the first season had.
Opening Shot: A truck backs up and unloads tires into an auto shop. “Things are going extremely well,” says a voice.
The Gist: Will (Steve Gerben), who manages a branch of the Valley Forge Automotive Center, is talking about how he’s been able to turn the money-losing location around, to the point where the shop makes a profit every month. The profits allow them to get a nice break room TV and an espresso machine, but most importantly, everyone who works there is getting bonuses.
Will has bigger plans, though, and his speech about how well they’re doing is for a meeting he and his father Jon (Peter Reeves), the owner of the chain, will have with the bank. The idea is to get a $750,000 to expand.
Everyone’s been doing different things with their bonuses. Will’s cousin Shane (Shane Gillis) got a gun and thinks it’s perfectly OK to bring the unloaded weapon to the garage. Cal (Chris O’Connor) wants to buy a vintage car from Andy (Andrew Schulz) and Tommy (Tommy Pope). Kilah (Kilah Fox) is too busy trying to figure out why her boyfriend keeps wanting threesomes with other guys, something that Will and Shane think make him “a potential homosexual.”
Will gets ready to go to his loan meeting, and puts Shane in charge. Shane keeps saying he doesn’t want to be management, but Will knows that, as much of a goofball Shane can be, he has potential. Will gets to the main branch to get his dad when he sees Dave Louvopolis (Stavros Halkias), the chain’s general manager, about to get busy with front desk clerk Lisa (Alexa Albanese), right on top of Jon’s desk.
Shane continues to be goofy despite being in charge, brandishing the gun whenever he gets the chance. But as he tries to talk to an impatient customer (Jon Lovitz), Cal tries to play a joke on Shane, which leads to yet another nightmare Will has to explain to his father.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tires is a workplace comedy along the lines of The Office crossed with the style of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
Our Take: Just like during the show’s first season, Tires struggles to balance character development with super-raunchy humor and doesn’t always succeed. Gillis, Gerben and McKeever are the creators of the show, and they can’t seem to help themselves during most episodes, giving Gillis almost all of the semi-offensive lines just to continue to show him being the goofball he is, and to contrast it with his impulses to just be a mechanic and a pain in the ass to Will.
Will continues to be the emotional center of the show, constantly trying to make the shop better while trying to shake his reputation as a nepo baby. Yes, he wants approval from his dad, and he’s constantly staving off the sniveling sliminess of Dave, whom he rips into for having an affair with someone he supervises. But he’s earnest about wanting the business to grow, as he tells the bank manager in a much more sincere speech than the one he wanted to give her. The more we can identify with him, and the more he’s shown to be a real character, the better the show will be.
It feels like Gillis can’t help but give Shane the same kind of “stepping right up to the line” talk that peppers his stand-up act. But when he does dumb stuff like point his “lady gun” at people in the service bay, all that is doing is obscuring the fact that he is actually supportive of Will and wants to do more in life. We wish we saw more of the character that Shane is becoming and less of the schtick that makes him look like he’s an ignorant bigot a lot of the time.
Sex and Skin: All talk, but it’s quite dirty talk.
Parting Shot: Will finds out about why the complaining customer is getting discounted service for life. Shane asks if he wants to see the gun.
Sleeper Star: Thomas Haden Church is going to have a recurring role in Season 2, which should be interesting.
Most Pilot-y Line: “It’s gonna start soon, Will,” Dave tells Will about a certain bodily process he was in the middle of when Will interrupted him.
Our Call: SKIP IT. We still can’t buy into the raunch-for-raunch’s-sake tone of Tires, even if the characters are at least starting to get personalities and motivations that go beyond just saying offensive things.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.