I know Shane Gillis is a controversial comedian, not in the Lenny Bruce sense, but because in 2019 he was cast on “Saturday Night Live” as a featured actor and was fired from the show, even before his first appearance, when comments surfaced that he They have seen me characterized as “racist, homophobic and misogynist.” I don't know what those comments were or in what context they were offered, but I guess they were supposed to be funny. And this February he returned to the show as a guest host.
Gillis is now the star and co-creator (with co-star Steve Gerben and director McKeever) of “Tires,” a six-episode Netflix comedy that has already been renewed for a second season. Since 1) Gillis is popular, if not popular with everyone, unpopular artists don't host “SNL”; 2) this is a relatively cheap show, filmed almost entirely in a single location; and 3) Netflix, in its eagerness to destroy the rest of television, wants to capture all possible audiences, this is not particularly surprising.
The comedian already has a stand-up special on Netflix, last year's “Beautiful Dogs,” which I haven't seen. As in a court where certain evidence can be excluded as prejudicial, it seemed fair to treat “Tires” blindly, on its own merits or lack thereof.
It's a simple show, set in an auto repair shop, incompetently run by Will (Gerben), one of several owned by his father. Gillis plays Shane, her cousin, an employee whose day is almost entirely spent mocking, humiliating and undermining Will. When starting out, Will mistakenly ordered 500 tires, which he tries to mitigate by pointing out that he got a volume discount. Returning them doesn't seem like an option.
Shane Gillis, left, with co-star Steve Gerben, who plays Will in “Tires.”
(Courtesy of Netflix)
Also working at the garage are Kilah (Kilah Fox), a receptionist, I guess, whose job seems to be smoking cigarettes and looking annoyed, and Cal (Chris O'Connor), the only one of them who might have a job elsewhere. Stavros Halkias plays the district director, who is usually present or on the phone; He is a big, long-haired, unkempt thorn.
Business is down, if it ever was up: the possibility of someone losing their job or the store closing extends throughout the season. They are bad at upselling customers, apparently the backbone of the auto repair business, but one wonders how they have customers to sell to, with their service being worse than non-existent. You probably wouldn't take your car there more than once.
Whether to represent the brand or to demonstrate that there is a place in the streaming universe for “offensive” humor, Gillis and company diligently push some buttons. (The Netflix guide describes “Tires” as “deadpan” and “raunchy.”) Among other things, we get “gay” as a pejorative, Shane puts on a bad Japanese accent, the word “pussy” in two senses (neither of which has anything to do with cats), an Italian insult, a joke about Jewish noses , a lot of talk about breasts and butts (not the terms used here) and a lot of sexual jokes. (I was going to write “crude sex jokes,” but it seemed redundant.) As if to balance this out, almost all of the women in the series (clients, most of them) are smarter than the men. (Except Cal, who would simply like to continue his work.)
You could say that these are characters and don't represent the personal predilections of the writers and actors, or that there are people like that in the world (presumably some are fans of Gillis' comedy), so the creators are just being, you know . , honest. Some of them are clearly idiots. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think of Shane as a charming, even admirable, self-possessed guy, in control of a situation (albeit to no positive effect) in a way that Will, a classic jerk, is not. . And yet, Gillis' best moments are when he stops being a jerk for a moment and becomes genuinely helpful or thoughtful; He has a surprising softness. As a screen presence, he is not unattractive.
The dilemma of what constitutes a joke and how to take it is, of course, at the center of much professional (and political) discourse these days, and people are always telling other people that they just don't get it or that they are being too sensitive or not sensitive enough. I didn't feel outraged: the humor, like the characters, is too juvenile to take seriously. Still, I didn't laugh even once. Humor is fun in that sense.
The season has a happy ending. It has to do with those tires.
