Dear Republic,
I wanted to give everybody a day to digest
’s immense, brilliant read of The Old Testament (TOT). And now for something completely different: an essay on the TV show Tires, which I hadn’t heard of before but is funny as shit.-ROL
TIRES IS THE ONLY COMEDY SHOW ON TV
Something interesting happened while I was watching TV last week. I laughed out loud.
It wasn’t one of those half laughs either, where you release one single, solitary “HA” or sharply exhale out of your nose. It was a genuine laugh that went on for several seconds. It was loud and long enough that my wife actually came into the room to ask me what I was watching.
The answer was Tires, the Shane Gillis led series now in its second season on Netflix. At its core, Tires is a workplace comedy that follows a group of misfits at an auto repair shop in suburban Pennsylvania. Most of the action takes place in a single location, and the humor is built around the characters and their familiarity with one another. If it ran in the ‘90s or 2000s, there wouldn’t necessarily be anything noteworthy about it (Except for its rampant use of the word “pussy.” There weren’t many networks where you could get away with that sort of thing back then.) It would have been one of many comedies, each trying to generate a laugh every thirty seconds so viewers would stick around and watch commercials for Tide.
But it isn’t the ‘90s or 2000s anymore. We’re now in our second decade of the streaming era, and the comedy landscape is much different, and far bleaker, than it was in the past. Because of this, Tires is an anomaly. It’s a true comedy that strives for, and elicits, frequent laughter.
Sure, there are plenty of shows out there that bill themselves as “comedies.” But how a show is labeled and what it actually is are not always in alignment. A lot of so-called comedies are just half hour dramas with a few jokes sprinkled in. I mean, The Bear won the Emmy for Best Comedy Series in 2023. I love The Bear, but it is absolutely not a comedy. Fellow Emmy winner Ted Lasso is also great (Well, the first two seasons are), but “funny” is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of it. “Inspiring” is. I’ve been moved watching Ted Lasso far more often than I’ve laughed.
Even the shows that attempt to be genuine comedies frequently fall flat, and that’s primarily a function of the writing. I’ve noticed a certain writing style infiltrating TV over the last half decade or so, something I like to call “Glorious Shit” comedy writing. It’s a term that comes from these lyrics in the Father John Misty song “The Memo.”
And friends it's not self-love that kills you
It's when those who hate you are allowed
To sell you that you’re a glorious shit
The entire world revolves around
And that you’re the eater, no not the eaten
But that your hunger will only cease
If you come binge on radiant blandness
At the disposable feast
Misty’s use of the phrase “glorious shit” here is meant to underline a certain way of being and moving through the world. It’s a reveling in one's own inadequacies, a celebration of being a hot mess. There is no shame in this self-awareness, nor any attempts to rectify personal faults. It’s all accepted as fact, or even a perverse type of strength. It’s Bugs Bunny slyly looking at the camera and asking “Ain’t I a stinker?”
A lot of characters I see in modern comedies have this attitude. They’re all struggling and just can’t even, and that becomes their entire personality. I believe this originated with Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock, where it was handled with tact and skill. But now, less talented writers than Fey have aped this posture, and it has replicated across the streaming ecosystem.
This character type is annoying in and of itself, but it's the way that it’s expressed via joke writing that really irks me. None of the jokes are ever presented in a straightforward manner. They’re always delivered as some kind of aside within a larger conversation. One character says something, another character responds, the first character throws in a sarcastic comment without directly addressing what was said, and the dialogue continues as if the comment was never made. The problem is, nobody actually talks like this. It all reads as meta-commentary by the writer on the dialogue, dialogue that they themselves wrote. It’s endlessly self-referential and recursive, but the point of origin isn’t anything organic, natural or real. As a result, the entire exchange comes across as completely inert.
Like most problems within the culture, the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Marvel movies. Joss Whedon employed this style in the ‘90s on TV’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and brought it to the big screen with 2012’s The Avengers and 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. Since those movies made many billions of dollars and so much of the entertainment industry is based on who plays copycat the best, his type of humor became the de facto form of comedic expression. Jokes became detached, snarky, and all-knowing, the characters so over it that they couldn’t be bothered to care. No matter what the words of the actual dialogue were, the punchline was always essentially “Well…THAT just happened!”
This style of writing is everywhere now. I’ve seen it in well-regarded TV comedies like Hacks and Abbott Elementary. It’s all over streaming slop like Shrinking and Nobody Wants This. Open any app on your smart TV, click on one of the “comedies” that are presented to you, and I guarantee you’ll see someone acting like a Glorious Shit in just a few short minutes.
The one exception I’ve come across is Tires.
The humor in Tires is grounded in the real world, and mirrors the sensibilities of average, everyday Americans. It’s the type of comedy that happens in service industry environments, where people from genuinely diverse backgrounds are trapped in the same shitty situation together and forced to make the best of it. This show reminds me of the teenage summers I spent working in restaurants, or my one brutal year after college at Enterprise Rent-A-Car (2008 was not a great job market to graduate into).
Tires is the opposite of Glorious Shit writing. The characters are constantly bouncing off of each other, interacting in real, human ways, and generating laughter from their natural conversations. There’s Will, the hapless, high-strung store manager, played by Steve Gerben. Gillis is his mechanic cousin Shane who, from their years growing up together, knows exactly how to wind Will up and push his buttons. Chris O’Connor plays soft-spoken mechanic Cal, who provides a counterweight to Shane’s antics in the back of the shop. Stavros Halkias is regional manager Dave, a sleazy, conniving, walking Id. And Kilah Fox steals every scene she’s in as front desk worker Kilah, the Platonic ideal of a mid-Atlantic white trash woman. You can put any combination of these characters in a room together, write them true to who they are, and the jokes will start flowing.
Truthfully, you don’t even have to mix these characters up to get laughs. Some of the funniest moments come when Will is by himself, rehearsing a conversation he’s about to have or winning an imaginary fight in his own mind. There’s one scene where Will is alone in the bathroom, wearing a long black wig and pretending to be Dave Grohl (It’s a long story as to how he got there). The way he looks in the mirror, flips his hair and nonchalantly says to no one in particular “Yeah, we’re going to the Viper Room later” absolutely took me out. We’ve all been there before, pretending to be someone we’re not, physically living out a fantasy because we think no one is watching. Putting the camera in the room during a private moment like this is so brilliant, unique, and honest. It’s these kinds of choices that set this show apart.
While the entire cast is great, Gillis is really the one who makes the whole thing go, and not just because of his on-screen performance. Tires perfectly aligns with the point of view he’s cultivated during his meteoric rise as a stand-up over the last five years. It’s insightful without being pretentious and biting without being too mean. There’s a throwaway line in one episode about how “Girls that do CrossFit look like Ninja Turtles” that I’ve thought about every time I’ve gone to the gym over the last two weeks. Gillis might not have written that line directly, but it’s the type of joke you’d see in one of his stand-up specials. The consistency across mediums is readily apparent once you’re familiar with both Tires and his comedy.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that part of the reason the comedy on Tires feels so unique is that it has somewhat of a right-wing bent to it. It’s not explicitly political in any way, but the humor is definitely working class, and working class humor is right-wing coded in 2025. That’s just the state of the culture.
The scene I’ve seen shared the most frequently online is one where Gillis takes over leading an HR training seminar, and slyly calls out the hypocrisy on each slide.
The line “Only white people can be racist, everybody else cannot be racist, and black people definitely love Chinese people” is something you’d expect to see on X, not in a Top 10 series on Netflix. This scene is somewhat of a mirror to the “Diversity Day” episode of The Office from 20 years ago (an episode they won’t even play in reruns on Comedy Central anymore). The major difference is that in The Office, Michael Scott and his ignorance are the butt of the joke. In Tires, the HR training itself is the joke. That’s where the opinion of the working class is, and Tires accurately reflects that. It’s refreshing to see. After years of every streamer putting out different versions of a show called something like The Hot Mess Lives Of Nonbinary Ivy League Grads, the blue collar perspective of Tires is a welcome change.
Ultimately though, the main reason Tires works is because everyone involved in the show are friends in real life. The main cast are all rooted in the Philadelphia comedy scene that Gillis sprang out of, and they’ve known each other for many years. Tires, in fact, was initially a self-produced ten minute short that was uploaded to Gillis’ YouTube page in 2019. The entire six episode first season was self-financed and produced before it was sold to Netflix. There was no outside influence, no notes from corporate executives, no sensitivity readers that had to pass over the scripts. It was just a group of like-minded collaborators doing their best to make each other laugh. It’s hard to go wrong when that’s your starting point. This is why the Cum Town podcast, which Halkias was also a part of, was so successful and influential. You can’t replicate the humor that comes from genuine chemistry between friends.
So what other comedies are out there for viewers to look forward to? Both South Park and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are back with new seasons this summer, but those are from an earlier era and have been grandfathered into the current environment. The Bear returned with a lackluster fourth season that didn’t make me laugh once. Every new comedy is a variation on the Glorious Shit trope (I saw a poster for Hulu’s Adults at a nearby bus stop and reflexively rolled my eyes). Maybe I’m missing something, but it feels like Tires is the only real comedy show in the current TV landscape.
But having only one example is better than having no examples at all. At the risk of taking comedy too seriously, I think it’s-gulp-important to have a show like this front and center on the biggest streaming service in the world, featuring one of America’s most popular comedians. In an entertainment landscape that’s frequently captured by ideology, snark, and arch meta-commentary, having a show that only wants to make you laugh goes a long way. Let’s just hope the streamers understand this and put more comedies like it into production. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long wait until Tires Season 3 next summer.
Peter James is a former stand-up comic living in New York City. He currently writes the Substack Diary of a Failed Comedian.
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