How do you profit from a sudden windfall of attention?
That’s what’s confronting the man-children of “Tires,” the Netflix sitcom from the comedian Shane Gillis, at the beginning of its recently released second season. The question digs at them both onscreen and behind the cameras.
The show’s first season, which aired last year, felt like a tentative demo — a lo-fi experiment in bawdy, blue-collar yuksmanship. Season 2 is crisper and slicker. The clothes fit better. The lighting is sharper. And the auto repair shop at the show’s center is thriving, or something like it. The spoils of success are trickling in.
Gillis, a frisky bear of a man who deftly tangles with the absurdities of contemporary culture and politics, is one of the standout comedic talents of the past few years. His humor is playful and plugged in, and delivered approachably. But he has at times deployed offense, or the appearance of it, in ways that have rendered him still something of an outsider from the mainstream, despite his huge popularity.
“Tires,” an episodic sitcom on a major streaming platform, is first and foremost an opportunity to bridge that divide. Can the edgelord comedy that’s defined the nü-bro movement of the past few years come out and play?
That remains to be seen. “Tires” is too inert to be offensive — curiously (purposely?) stakesless and edgeless for one of the few performers capable of making comedic hay of the current paroxysms around ideological purity (on all sides). Itchier provocations can be found in one Michael Scott monologue on a random episode of “The Office,” or truer right-leaning red meat on any of Tim Allen’s sitcoms.
Gillis is attempting something far more slippery on this ploddingly paced and curiously mannered show. His characters live in the woolly area where harmful and harmless overlap, and their button-pushing behavior plumbs the difference between misunderstanding and malice, stupidity and ignorance.
“Tires” takes place in a Pennsylvania car repair center and the efforts of Will (Steve Gerben, one of the show’s creators along with Gillis and John McKeever), a goofy manager trying desperately to establish control over an unruly staff led by Shane (Gillis) and the fickle customers who come in the door.
Precious little of consequence happens in each episode. Mostly, the guys goof off, poke fun at each other, and run up against the outer limits of their curiosities and talents. Its main mode is futility cut through with boyish misbehavior. The jokes are childish and take equal aim — at women, Catholic priests, Jews, Black people, the physically disabled — but are mostly delivered in a manner that suggests the teller knows they’re out of line, but wants to see just how much he can get away with without leaving a bruise.
Yet somehow, it all adds up to something almost strategically neutral — a covert infiltration into the mainstream so as to later unleash something far more wry or sardonic or rude. But that scrape never arrives.
There are high jinks — one episode revolves around a bag of cocaine and how it affects different people in the shop, and the season opener, about a handgun Shane buys with bonus money and waves around recklessly, feels like a both-sides-of-the-aisle taunt. “Trigger discipline,” he deadpans to a co-worker. “You don’t even know about that because you’re a liberallllll.”
In some moments, “Tires” is eager to remind that the impulse to insult and generalize is in everyone. One episode features a Hispanic human resources counselor who tries, and fails, to provide training for the staff, but loses the moral high ground after she lashes out at one of their wives. In another, a buttoned-up business consultant retches at the sight of the musty trailer belonging to one of the managers, a kind of seductive troll, yet somehow finds herself staying around for a romp.
Almost all the employees are men, which for the show — a paean to the shortcomings of intermale communication is both bug and feature. There is a romantic interest for Shane this season, emphasis on interest. He is barely able to verbalize his affections in a healthy way, and she eventually shakes him loose for good.
Peel back the fumbling and horsing around, though, and there is a sly political argument running through “Tires,” expressed largely through its chorus of special guests and minor characters. Several episodes place the tire shop crew in proximity to men who are far more toxic, and far more practiced at it. There’s a pair of pathetic shock jocks, Dogman & the Squirt, who work blue on the local radio station and speed talk Shane and Will into risky territory. There’s Ron Dobbins, a washed-up former NASCAR champion who drops by the shop for a doomed meet & greet.
The most overt nod to the current manosphere moment is Brock Majors, a self-help guru — a cross between Tony Robbins and Andrew Tate — who browbeats salesmen at dead-end conventions. He’s an object of awe, but receives his comeuppance. (There are also cameos from acidic comics Jon Lovitz, Vince Vaughn and Ron White, who plays Dobbins.)
Before all of these men, Shane and his buddies are helpless and hapless, wowed at the idea of living this freely, then repelled by the costs. They are role models turned cautionary tales. They make Shane and his crew seem like amateurs.
But crucially, they also represent a long continuum of male misbehavior played for laughs. It is historical cover, and also an implicit reply to the media anxiety over Gillis and many in his orbit.
In 2019, he had a microscandal in which he was chosen for a slot in the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” then had the offer revoked over his use of a racial slur and insensitive remarks he had made on podcasts. His big break turned into an immediate roadblock — and he went from anonymity to cause cancelèbre overnight.
In a way, Gillis’s quick cycle of ascent, crash and rebirth allowed him to begin addressing the obstacles that many of the manosphere’s current nü-bro stars are heading toward. Most are still building creative work largely outside the moral spheres of mainstream Hollywood and media — hence YouTube, podcasts, comedy clubs and so on. But blessed with both an audience and something of a scarlet letter, Gillis is the most interested in finding his way back to fame’s mainstream, or perhaps to remake it in his mold.
As a comedian, he’s unflashily gifted. He’s returned to host “SNL” twice. His standup is nimble — see his disarming 2023 Netflix special, “Beautiful Dogs” — and his podcast, Matt & Shane’s Secret Podcast, is risqué but winkingly so. And in his occasional turns playing President Donald Trump on “Kill Tony,” Tony Hinchcliffe’s comedy variety show, Gillis is at his most pointed and layered.
On that show, which appears primarily on YouTube, a cavalcade of awkward, disheveled comedians roll out material one at a time for a panel of judges. On the most recent Kill Tony Netflix special, “Kill Tony: Kill or Be Killed,” Gillis, as Trump, cheerily eviscerated them. He poked at a Vietnamese comic who was adopted by a Jewish family: “All we’ve done for the Jewish people, we’ve given you our entire government, and what did you do, other than commit genocide? Which, as a Vietnamese person, you would think, maybeeee we’re against that type of thing.”
To a shambolic white comic: “They said when we got rid of the Mexicans, we’d have no one to work. Look at all the loser whites we have in this country. We’ve got an army of loser whites.”
Gillis plays Trump as buffoonish but secretly wise, deploying his just-saying-whatever bombast to sneak in critiques of right-wing dogma. It’s an affectionate portrayal of a cocksure simpleton.
Gillis manages this in part because of how he uses his body. When he stands — he’s 6-foot-4 and lumberjack sturdy — he tends to bend at the neck ever so slightly, so as to slightly minimize his presence. And Gillis soft steps rather than pounding around, giving him an apologetic mien. Overall, he exudes a kind of soothing Sandlerian hangdogness. Undoubtedly, a decade or two from now, an auteur director will find a way to radically remake him in a role of great tragic empathy.
For now, though, it’s masturbation jokes, and also gestures. With “Tires,” Gillis appears to be aiming for a post-liberal restoration of mainstream comedy values to somewhere in the late ’80s, but with a greater dose of self-awareness.
Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t invest his characters with any real authority. Try though they may, they’re not bullies. One of the few notable smiles Shane delivers all season is in a scene where he sets up a pair of high school students to be stopped by a cop for buying beer, then crudely and hilariously berates them, “Scared Straight!”-style. For just a moment, he’s the man.
That’s a fleeting thrill, though. The sameness of the days bleeds together. Little moments of hope and humor fade. Escape routes get cut off. The men of “Tires” have nowhere to go, and no way to get there.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
The post What Does Shane Gillis Want (to Get Away With)? appeared first on New York Times.
