Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
A public-access nightmare on Adult Swim: fake commercials for useless Cinco products, amateur actors recruited off Craigslist, John C. Reilly as the dazed newsman Dr. Steve Brule, and editing that made every frame feel slightly broken. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim called it "the nightmare version of television," and from 2007 to 2010 it was either the funniest or the most hated thing on the block.
Heidecker and Wareheim built the show out of the live-action material from their earlier Adult Swim series Tom Goes to the Mayor, carrying over the Cinco Corporation and its inefficient, tasteless products and the Channel 5 news team. It premiered on February 11, 2007, as a run of sketches, songs and faux commercials, with Doug Lussenhop's editing and effects deliberately making everything look off-kilter. The targets were infomercials, corporate training videos and TV shopping channels, and the performers were a mix of regulars like Zach Galifianakis, Bob Odenkirk, Will Forte, Maria Bamford, Jeff Goldblum and "Weird Al" Yankovic, who hosted the public-access variety hour Uncle Muscles Hour in a gravelly voice, alternative acts like Neil Hamburger, Tommy Wiseau and David Liebe Hart, once-famous names like Karen Black and Alan Thicke, and amateur actors found through Craigslist. John C. Reilly's Dr. Steve Brule became the breakout.
Adult Swim picked the show up for as many as 30 more episodes halfway through the first season, and the second began on November 18, 2007. Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Ben Stiller and Ted Danson turned up for cameos. The New York Times' Dave Itzkoff wrote that it "revels in an aesthetic of awkwardness," while Flak Magazine's James Norton called it "the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge" and noted it had been "much hated-upon by the Adult Swim fan base." The fifth season, billed as "Season Cinco" and rated TV-MA, was pitched by Wareheim as "a very dark side" of the show, and the finale aired on May 2, 2010.
The afterlife ran long. Reilly's spin-off Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule premiered two weeks after the finale, the hour-long Chrimbus Special aired that December, and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie followed in January 2012. The duo's Abso Lutely Productions sign-off, Heidecker's father on a 1991 family vacation answering "Abso-lutely," became its own tiny ritual. A 2020 Times reappraisal called it "sketch comedy at its most abrasive, bizarre and, for some reason, endearing."
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