Making impressionable waves in the stand-up comedy scene over the last 5 years, comedian Shane Gillis is on a meteoric rise to stardom for being an incredibly funny, unfiltered, authentic funny-man who’s comedic talents range from laugh-out-loud sketch comedy on YouTube, having two acclaimed stand-up specials, a hit podcast, and a well-received hosting appearance recently on Saturday Night Live, a show that hired Gillis back in 2019, but then promptly fired him from the show after controversies around his material didn’t sit well with the SNL producers.
One of the videos that put Shane Gillis on the map was a self-financed TV show pilot he made with his writing/producing partners McKeever and Steve Gerben called Tires – a comedy show about the dysfunctional employees of an underperforming auto-repair shop. Now with Gillis’ success, including a Netflix produced stand-up special, Tires has hit Netflix as a six-part, easily bingeable series that showcases what really works about Gillis and Co.’s comedic sensibilities, but also what can go wrong when you don’t have enough story to completely justify the shows existence.
Not straying to far from the original YouTube pilot, Tires follows Will (Steve Gerber), the heir to his father’s auto-shop franchise, Valley Forge Automotive. Will’s latest stuff up, in what seems like an endless string of inadequate decisions running this shop into the ground, involves over-ordering as mass quantity of tires.
In the hopes of selling the tires quickly, Will attempts to enlist the help of his unreliable and unwilling co-workers, Shane (Shane Gillis), Cal (Chris O’Connor), and Kilah (Kilah Fox) to take part in an initiative that focuses on attracting more female customers to the shop by making them “feel safe and comfortable”.
From the get-go, Tires plays it’s juvenile humour card with joke after joke about stupid dudes saying dumb things at truly inappropriate times, playing hard into stereotypical tropes of the “manly-man” environment of the auto-repair world.
And it seems like nothing is off-limits, with the ‘C-bomb’ dropping within the first 60 seconds in a mistaken voicemail Will sends to his dad, Italian American store owners loudly discussing whether they love a woman’s “front or back” more, and Shane telling a female customer he loves her while accidentally pulling a “serial killer” look with his face. It’s juvenile as hell, and some of it is actually quite funny.
A lot of the laughs land in the court of Shane Gillis, who uses his trademark piss-take on toxic masculine culture and leans into the stupidity of it all with such authenticity. There’s also an air of improvisation across the board which does give Tires the feeling that these conversations, no matter how ridiculous or vulgar, quite hilariously reflect the environment of which the show is set.
Where Tires really loses steam is that each episode feel quite similar to the last, with the main narrative thread tying everything together centres around Will’s drastic attempts to keep the shop alive. In fact, each episode follows the same structure too closely: Will has an idea, the other workers find a way to mess it up.
Even though Tires isn’t necessarily the show audiences will tune into for a riveting and engaging story, it’s unfortunately a little too bare bones to hold interest throughout all six episodes, despite the show’s bingeable nature by each episode only being 18-22 minutes long, making it a very easy, breezy watch.
Tires is a funny, easy watch if you’re a fan of Shane Gillis and his take on modern juvenile humour. It’s dick jokes and F-bombs galore, and it’s just good enough to add to this weekend’s watchlist, but don’t expect a lot of re-watchability once the final episode’s credits roll.
All six-episodes of Tires are streaming on Netflix from May 23.
