Is Tires Actually Good Now?
Twelve episodes of Tires arrive on Netflix on Thursday, August 13, all at once, the way both previous seasons landed. Season two ran 12 episodes at roughly 20 to 23 minutes each, so the ask is somewhere around four and a half hours, one evening if you are committed and two nights if you are sensible. Shane Gillis and Steve Gerben's comedy about a failing auto repair chain in suburban Pennsylvania, the Valley Forge Automotive Center, is popular enough that clearing that slot is a real decision. Whether it earns the evening depends almost entirely on which season you last tried.
The take that expired
Tires carries a reputation as the show critics loathe and viewers watch anyway. Half of that is true, and the half everyone repeats is two years stale.
Season one, six episodes and barely two hours of television, sits at 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 16 reviews, with a 44 out of 100 from Metacritic across nine critics. The site's consensus called it an "unambitious sitcom" that "will need to rev up the inspiration to get real traction." Audiences gave those same six episodes 86 percent. That is the split people still cite when they tell you the show is critic-proof junk.
Then season two came out and the critics moved. It sits at 78 percent, and the audience number went up alongside it, to 91. Series-wide the tally now reads 58 percent from critics and 89 percent from viewers. That gap narrowed because the show got better, not because anyone lowered a standard.
What actually changed
Season one was two people in a garage. Gillis and Gerben improvising at each other is a great podcast segment and a thin sitcom, and the critics who called it shapeless were describing something real. Season two doubled the length to 12 episodes, brought in Thomas Haden Church as Phil Jacobs, and finally gave Cal, Kilah and Dave something to do besides react. It stopped being a two-hander with witnesses.
So read the season three casting as the same repair rather than a confession. Netflix has added Rachel Blanchard, Garret Dillahunt and Matt Walsh. Dillahunt has spent 20 years being the funniest person in other people's shows, and Walsh built Mike McLintock on Veep out of pure ambient incompetence. Neither of them is structure. Neither is there to impose a plot. They are more bodies to be loose with, which is what the loose thing was short of.
The defenders are right about the appeal. Very little else on a major streamer is content to simply be a hangout sitcom, where the plot is a pretext and the pleasure is familiar people talking in a room you recognize, at a moment when most prestige comedy has quietly turned into drama with jokes in it. They are wrong about one thing, though. Cheap and loose are not the same property, and only one of them was ever the point. Season one was both. Season two kept the loose and fixed the other half.
The verdict, and the 25 minute test
Worth the evening. With conditions, and with a specific instruction for anyone who has not committed yet.
Do not start with season one. It is the weakest version of this show and it is the source of every dismissal you have read. Do not start with season three either, because a hangout comedy is close to unwatchable before you know the people.
Start with season two, episode one. Twenty five minutes. That is the season the critics turned around on and the season where the cast finally outnumbers the premise, which makes it the fairest sample the show has. If nothing in that half hour lands, stop there. Tires has one register and that episode plays it at full volume, and there is no later gear it shifts into. You will have spent 25 minutes instead of five hours finding out.
If season two already worked for you, Thursday is a straightforward yes: clear a night, not a week. And if what you want from a comedy is a story, an arc, somewhere for these people to end up, skip it. That was never on offer here, and season three is not going to start.
