Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Season 3
Starring Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim
Warner Home Video
Release Date: August 4, 2009

In the past six months I’ve watched two full seasons of Adult Swim’s live-action sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and I’m afraid to say the show is growing on me. Each episode runs barely twelve minutes and the individual skits usually wrap up around the one-minute mark, but there are still more laughs per capita in a single episode of Tim and Eric than in an entire season of Saturday Night Live.

Unlike most sketch comedy series show creators, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim know the limits of the idea that drives each sketch and never wear out its welcome. While I often laughed hard at the show, it took me some time to really understand what it was all about, but now I do. Tim and Eric Awesome Show has more of a Canadian comic spirit than an American one. Each episode plays like a compilation tape of highlights from shows broadcast on some strange alternate universe version of a cable access television station staffed by a freewheeling collection of misfits and miscreants hopelessly convinced that they’re not engaging in amateur night theatrics. The influence of classic Canuck cathode comedies like SCTV and The Kids in the Hall can be seen in every episode and with each season the show continues to improve. The writing and performances continue to wallow in the wildest off-the-wall ideas the show’s cast and crew can conjure up, but as evidenced in several episodes there’s an increased confidence in their willingness to go completely for broke with their ideas.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Season 2
Starring Eric Wareheim, Tim Heidecker
Warner Home Video
Release Date: February 10, 2009

Launching a sketch comedy series these days often turns out to be a thankless task since very few of them ever manage to catch on during their first season. For every Saturday Night Live there’s a Fridays, for every In Living Color there’s a House of Buggin’, and for every Mr. Show with Bob and David there’s a Cedric the Entertainer Presents. Most sketch comedy series tend to fail because they’re little more than an interesting gimmick and a handful of failed attempts at creating iconic characters and hip catchphrases. There’s never any thought put into crafting skits that are genuinely hilarious and over-the-top performances that mostly veer close to being flat out obnoxious and sour movie parodies that would be rejected by even Cracked magazine become the order of the day.

The Cartoon Network’s nightly Adult Swim programming block has featured live-action shows to compliment their animated shows in the past. Two years ago Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the creators of the short-lived Adult Swim staple Tom Goes to the Mayor, merged their unique brand of humor with the sketch comedy format and the result was Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. Of all the shows on Adult Swim Tim and Eric may be the most experimental, each 11-minute episode a strange sculpture built out of the strange programs one could find between cable channels early in the morning. There are a ton of small skits crammed into every show and each one often manages to spin humor out of the most unlikely sources, and some sources ripe for a comedic ripping.