Somewhere, amid its fart jokes, Netflix’s new comedy series Tires explores the daily struggle for contentment, or whatever passes for it in the meantime.
Tires, the brainchild of comedian Shane Gillis, co-written and co-produced alongside frequent collaborators Steve Gerben and John McKeever, follows the troubles of a failing branch of Valley Forge Automotive, located in a purgatorial stretch of concrete in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The store is managed by Will (Gerben; as in older sitcoms like Seinfeld, most characters in Tires share a name with the actor who portrays them), a failson granted the position by his father who owns the chain. Will mistakes it for an opportunity, while it’s apparent to his cousin and mechanic Shane (Gillis) that this is the only store unprofitable enough to safely sequester them away. Shane understands the mediocrity because he’s responsible for it, spending most of his time on the clock making sure Will, fellow mechanic Cal (Chris O’Connor), and white trash receptionist Kilah (Kilah Fox) don’t do any work either.
For all the recent talk of trades, this is the sort of drudgery that sends you fleeing to student loans. Will remains in denial about his situation, thinking his next harebrained marketing gimmick will lift the store and him with it. Shane is aware of the indignity, to which he responds with an existential juvenility. One must imagine Sisyphus, or perhaps Shanegillis, happy. Cal and Kilah seem to be living their best possible lives splashing around in the above-ground pool of despair, with highlights not much higher than a smoke break. Yet still the team clocks in every morning. And when the branch faces closure, they find the modicum of ambition left within to mount a defense.
Gillis, one of stand-up’s biggest breakout acts of the past five years, is perhaps best known for getting fired off SNL immediately after getting hired on its writing staff, after some lifeless professional internet sleuth found an old podcast clip of him making off-color jokes. (As a fan of said podcast, I would argue the inciting joke was taken out of context, though given the full body of his vulgarity, it was like Al Capone going down for tax evasion.) Gillis has since shook the dust off and become one of the most popular touring comedians in the country, proving that the best answer to cancellation is simply ignoring it.
Gillis is pigeonholed by his admirers and detractors as a conservative comedian, a partly fair assessment at best. It may be true of his style. He speaks fondly of his Trump-supporting family, which to most tastemakers places him slightly to the right of Pinochet. But what’s true to most tastemakers and what’s actually true are so different as to be almost impossible to use the same language to compare. What’s actually useful to say about Gillis is that he plays into your biases, his frat boy gone-to-seed persona letting him sneak in some nuance that both the easily pleased and the easily offended rarely catch.
Gillis is also probably the best vocal impersonator of Trump alive — which isn’t nothing, since everyone on Earth has tried out that voice over the past eight years. If he shares anything substantive with Trump, it's a lack of patience toward social politesse. The characters in Tires follow Gillis’s uncouth example, the underlying message being that decorum is a luxury of the idle, not those on the margins.
To distill Tires into a sentence, it's the dream of Parks and Recreation fulfilled. Parks and Recreation started from a similar premise, following thankless but vital small-town government work in flyover country. But it soon grew embarrassed of its minor ambitions and decided that it actually wanted to be thanked a lot. All the government employees hit the eject button and land safely in Washington, D.C., to govern the unwashed masses from a safe distance. It remains the perfect time capsule of Obama-era media, where caring for your constituents was synonymous with correcting them. Something golden and orange loomed off the horizon; on first glance one might mistake it for a sunrise.
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In a pep talk Shane delivers to six models before a bikini car wash (Gillis occasionally indulges as well as engages with his frat boy persona), he recognizes that any person at a tire shop at 2 p.m. isn't living their best life. But the funny part about your life being over is that it continues regardless. Meanwhile the sun is out, the beer is cold, and the models are beautiful when squinting through a combination of the two. The characters of Parks and Recreation fled for cooler cities, but there’s nowhere for the staff of Valley Forge Automotive to go. They’re stuck in an unglamorous job, but then someone has to change those brake pads. Society can only run thanks to the efforts of those embarrassed to attend their high school reunion.
What Tires says, through some funny, exasperated, dumb, and mostly expertly-executed jokes, is something that might be the anthem of a whole class of Americans, something John Mellencamp once sang in the song “Pink Houses”:
He's got greasy hair, greasy smile
He says, "Lord, this must be my destination"
'Cause they told me when I was younger
Said, "Boy, you're gonna be president"
But just like everything else those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went.
Joe Joyce is a writer in ____. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.
