Shane Gillis’ Bros-Will-Be-Bros, Anti-Woke Sitcom Is Infuriatingly Bad
From a distance, Tires looks like a sitcom, maybe even enough to inspire some knee-jerk nostalgia for a time when comedies had a familiar shape, undistorted by atypical streaming models or low-laugh dramedies.
The bona fides here are instantly recognizable. Episodes run around 22 minutes. The show stars Shane Gillis, popular stand-up comedian who parlayed being “canceled” and fired from Saturday Night Light into folk-hero mega-success. Here, he plays a character who shares his first name, like any number of ’90s-era vehicles. It’s set at a workplace, in this case an auto center, allowing the show to throw a handful of eccentric, underdog personalities together and bumble through some easy-to-digest situations. At the same time, Tires avoids the corny, predictable rhythms of a pure throwback: It’s a single-camera show with a little bit of handheld quasi-verisimilitude. It resembles a little of The Office, a little of Taxi, and a more blue-collar Home Improvement.
Looking closer, however, reveals Tires as an even more contemporary phenomenon: the seemingly straightforward sitcom that’s pieced together from hazy, secondhand recollections of previous shows—a sitcom that’s like a pop quiz the creators arrogantly refused to study for. Marvel’s She-Hulk was one of these half-formed, rough-draft, written-from-memory shows; Tires is another, made for anyone who hated She-Hulk for its wokeness. It’s a bros-will-be-bros hangout session where comedians can cosplay as working class, valorizing their hackiest and most bullying instincts as regular-guy joshing.