Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!: The Complete Guide
Fifty eleven-minute episodes of public-access nightmare, fake products and John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule. How Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim made the ugliest show on television, and why so much internet comedy now looks like it.
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! was a sketch series by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim that aired on Adult Swim from February 2007 to May 2010: five seasons, 50 episodes of about eleven minutes each. It looked like a public-access variety show assembled by people who had never seen television, and it was either the funniest or the most unbearable thing on air, depending on who you asked. Both reactions were the point.
This guide covers how the duo got to Adult Swim, how the show worked, the characters and bits worth knowing, everything they made next, and where to watch it in 2026. For Heidecker’s whole career, including On Cinema and his music, see our Tim Heidecker profile.
From Temple University to Adult Swim
Heidecker and Wareheim met as film students at Temple University in Philadelphia and started making short comedy videos together. Their early work already had the signature: cheap video, stiff performances, a sense that something had gone wrong in the edit and nobody had noticed.
The decisive break was Bob Odenkirk. He saw their videos, became their mentor, and served as executive producer on their first series. The arc from Mr. Show to Tim and Eric runs straight through him, and the duo have said Mr. Show was a major inspiration. Our Bob Odenkirk profile covers his role as a producer and talent scout.
Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004–2006)
Their first Adult Swim show, Tom Goes to the Mayor, ran for two seasons. Heidecker plays Tom Peters, a well-meaning man who keeps bringing business ideas to the Mayor of the town of Jefferton (Wareheim). The ideas go wrong; Tom’s life gets worse. Its look was distinctive and cheap by design: photographs of the actors, traced and barely animated, against flat backgrounds.
The show introduced characters and bits that carried over, including the Cinco Corporation and the Channel 5 Married News Team, and drew guest appearances from Odenkirk and other comedians from his circle. It is gentler and more narrative than what followed, and worth a look if you want to see the sensibility before it fully curdled.
How Awesome Show worked
Awesome Show premiered on February 11, 2007. It dropped the animation and the story and kept the attitude, turning it up as far as it would go. A few features defined it:
The look of bad television
Each episode is a collage: fake commercials, phoney instructional videos, cheesy musical numbers, chat segments that go nowhere. The visual language is borrowed from public-access cable, local TV ads and corporate training tapes: wipes and chroma-key, VHS degradation, garish fonts, music that sounds like it came with the editing software. The show used those looks deliberately and precisely, which is harder than it sounds.
Uncomfortable intimacy
The camera gets far too close: mouths, sweat, food, skin. Performances are stiff in exactly the way of non-actors in a local ad. Scenes hold past the point of comfort. This is anti-comedy in the strict sense, built on the absence of the release a normal joke gives you.
Real people and famous guests side by side
The show mixed real outsider performers, including the puppeteer and singer David Liebe Hart and the elderly performer Richard Dunn, with famous faces willing to look ridiculous: John C. Reilly, Zach Galifianakis, Jeff Goldblum, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Bob Odenkirk were regulars, with brief turns from Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd and others. The tension between sincere and ironic performance is one of the show’s most debated features: depending on your view, the outsider artists are either celebrated or exploited, and the show never fully resolved that.
Short and dense
At eleven minutes an episode, there is no time to settle. The format suited late-night Adult Swim, and in hindsight it also anticipated the short-clip internet, where the show’s bits have had a long second life.
Characters and bits worth knowing
- Dr. Steve Brule (John C. Reilly): a bumbling, mispronouncing “health” correspondent with a gift for getting everything wrong. Reilly’s commitment is extraordinary, and the character earned his own spin-off.
- Cinco products: an endlessly expanding line of useless or dangerous consumer goods sold in cheery fake ads. The Cinco commercials are where the show’s satire of advertising is sharpest.
- Casey Tatum (Tim Heidecker): one of the show’s recurring oddballs, a reminder of how much of the show rests on Heidecker’s ability to play pathetic confidence.
- Channel 5 Married News Team: a local news segment staffed by a married couple, carried over from Tom Goes to the Mayor.
- “Celery Man” (with Paul Rudd): a short sketch in which Rudd asks a computer for increasingly baffling images. It became one of the most-shared Tim and Eric clips online and a meme in its own right.
- David Liebe Hart’s segments: songs and puppet routines from a performer who had been doing his own public-access work in Los Angeles for years before the show.
Why it could only happen on Adult Swim
It is hard to imagine any other American network airing Awesome Show in 2007. Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late-night block, had already built an audience on cheap, strange, short-form shows such as Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Its eleven-minute slots, small budgets and young, nocturnal viewers were exactly what Heidecker and Wareheim needed: room to be obscure, and no pressure to explain themselves.
The limitations became the style. A show that cannot afford slick effects can make cheapness the joke; a show with eleven minutes cannot waste time on set-up. Many alt-comedy breakthroughs follow that pattern, a constraint turned into a signature, and Awesome Show is one of the clearest examples.
Is it for you?
Honestly: maybe not. If your favourite sketch comedy is built on clever premises and clean punchlines, much of Awesome Show will feel like being trapped in a waiting room with a broken television. If you enjoy the comedy of discomfort, repetition and pure wrongness, or you already love I Think You Should Leave, there is a good chance it will click. Most fans describe the same experience: the first episode baffles, the third starts to make sense, and by the fifth the theme music is stuck in your head.
Reception: genius or garbage?
Awesome Show divided critics and audiences from the start. Some reviewers wrote it off as noise; others recognised it as some of the most original comedy on television. In The New York Times, Dave Itzkoff described the show as one that revels in an aesthetic of awkwardness, which is about as fair a summary as anyone has managed. The final season, which the duo called “Season Cinco,” got darker and more grotesque, and is the hardest to love.
Its reputation has climbed steadily. Its look now reads less as a joke about television than as a prophecy of the internet.
Spin-offs, films and what came next
| Year | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 onward | Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule | Adult Swim spin-off for John C. Reilly’s character, premiered May 2010. |
| 2012 | Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie | Feature film in which the duo blow a studio’s billion dollars and try to pay it back by reviving a dying shopping mall. Released on demand in January 2012, then in cinemas. |
| 2013–2017 | Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories | Adult Swim horror-comedy anthology, where the dread under the earlier shows comes to the surface. |
| 2017 | Awesome Show 10th-anniversary special | A one-off return to the format on Adult Swim. |
| 2020 | Beef House | A twisted parody of the multi-camera family sitcom for Adult Swim. |
Their production company, Abso Lutely Productions, founded with producer Dave Kneebone, became a home for other unusual comedy, including Nathan Fielder’s Nathan For You and The Eric Andre Show.
Separately, Heidecker built the long-running fictional universe of On Cinema at the Cinema with Gregg Turkington, released several albums of sincere songwriting and played a mean anti-comic in An Evening with Tim Heidecker (2020). Wareheim moved into directing music videos and commercials and played Arnold, Dev’s friend, in Aziz Ansari’s Master of None.
Tim and Eric’s influence
The family tree is easy to trace. Upstream are Mr. Show and The Kids in the Hall. Downstream, Tim and Eric helped make room for the uncomfortable commitment of I Think You Should Leave (Heidecker himself appears in it), for Adult Swim oddities like The Eric Andre Show, and for a whole generation of online creators who learned that bad-looking could be a style. For the decade around them, see our history of alt comedy in the 2000s.
Where to watch Tim and Eric in 2026
As of 2026, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! streams on HBO Max, where Adult Swim’s catalogue has lived since 2020, along with Tom Goes to the Mayor, Bedtime Stories and Check It Out! in most cases. Billion Dollar Movie is usually available to rent. Adult Swim’s official YouTube channel posts many clips. Rights change, so check locally.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of humor is Tim and Eric?
It is absurdist anti-comedy built on the look of bad television: public-access shows, cheap local commercials, corporate training videos. The jokes come from awkwardness, repetition, grotesque close-ups and deliberately clumsy editing rather than conventional setups and punchlines.
How many seasons of Tim and Eric Awesome Show are there?
Five seasons of ten episodes each, 50 in total, aired on Adult Swim from February 2007 to May 2010. There were also two specials, a 2010 holiday special and a 10th-anniversary special in 2017.
When did Tim and Eric Awesome Show first air?
It premiered on Adult Swim on February 11, 2007, following the duo’s earlier Adult Swim series Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004–2006).
Where did Tim and Eric start their careers?
They met as film students at Temple University in Philadelphia and made short comedy videos together. Bob Odenkirk saw their work and became their mentor and executive producer, which led to Tom Goes to the Mayor on Adult Swim.
Where can I watch Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job?
As of 2026 it streams on HBO Max, where it has been since 2020 along with other Adult Swim series. Clips also circulate on Adult Swim’s official YouTube channel.