Television series
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
- Absurdist comedy
- Strange
- Dip in and out
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is fifteen minutes of deliberately terrible television — public-access sketches, fake commercials, and characters who linger just a beat too long. It's less a comedy than an assault on comedy's rhythms: uncomfortable, ugly, occasionally beautiful in its wrongness. Not for casual viewing; it rewards (or punishes) full attention. If you find bad taste hilarious and structure optional, this is your show.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you enjoy surreal, deadpan sketch comedy where the jokes come from awkward commercial parodies and performers who commit completely to a bad idea, with no safety net.
Skip it if you want a story or recurring characters to follow, since this is a grab bag of short bits, and its cringe-heavy, deliberately amateur style can grate quickly over a full season.
What it asks of you: Each episode runs about fifteen minutes and jumps between unrelated sketches, so you need to accept dropped threads and sudden tonal lurches rather than a steady build.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Wonder Showzen2005
Sketch comedy disguised as a kids' show, gleefully misusing puppets and children to make political and absurdist points that Tim and Eric only hinted at. It's the closest thing in tone and nerve — upsetting and funny in the same breath.
But It's meaner and darker than Awesome Show ever gets, using real kids and real puppets to land punches that can feel cruel rather than absurd.
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson2019
Modern heir to the throne of comedy that refuses to end a sketch gracefully — Robinson commits to humiliation and discomfort with the same manic sincerity Tim and Eric brought to their fake commercials.
But It's tighter and more polished, and less willing to just sit in ugliness for its own sake — some of the chaos has been sanded down.
The Eric Andre Show2012
A talk show that destroys itself every episode, mixing real celebrity interviews with anarchic, often violent absurdity. Same anti-comedy DNA, cranked up into full physical chaos.
But Louder and more aggressive than Awesome Show's slower, creepier weirdness — this is chaos as spectacle, not as dread.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Ernie Kovacs Show1951
Kovacs invented the idea that television itself — its glitches, its conventions, its self-seriousness — could be the joke, decades before Tim and Eric turned public-access aesthetics into art.
Decades before Adult Swim existed, Kovacs was already breaking television on purpose — visual gags built entirely around the medium's own machinery, deadpan absurdity, and a total disregard for whether anything made sense.
But The pacing and production values belong entirely to 1950s television, and its charm requires patience for genuinely old-fashioned rhythms.
More like this (7)
Nathan for You2013
Nathan Fielder's deadpan business schemes take the show's love of terrible ideas executed with total sincerity and stretch it into long-form, real-world discomfort comedy that somehow becomes strangely moving.
But It's slower and gentler, built around real people rather than surreal characters — less absurdist assault, more patient cringe.
Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule2010
John C. Reilly's man-child health expert wandering through fake public-access segments, mumbling non sequiturs. Practically a spin-off in spirit — same universe of deliberately broken television.
But One joke stretched across many episodes; if Brule's stammering doesn't hit you in the first five minutes, it won't grow on you.
Xavier: Renegade Angel2007
An animated fever dream about a deformed philosopher-warrior spouting garbled wisdom, made by the same Adult Swim brain trust that loves ugly visuals and non-sequitur dialogue as comedy.
But The crude, deliberately hideous animation is a real barrier, and its stream-of-consciousness dialogue makes even less narrative sense than Awesome Show.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast1994
Adult Swim's ancestor: a cartoon superhero interviewing real celebrities on a cheap talk-show set, awkward silences and all. You can see exactly where Tim and Eric's love of low-budget surrealism comes from.
But It's tamer and more dated now, a relic of early Adult Swim rather than something that still feels dangerous.
Documentary Now!2015
A mockumentary anthology that commits so hard to its fake documentary conventions that the joke becomes the craft itself — the same love of format-as-bit that fuels Awesome Show's fake commercials.
But It's calmer, cleverer, and much less interested in being upsetting — more a comedy of recognition than a comedy of dread.
American Movie1999
Same love of ugly, low-budget, sincerely terrible creative effort — Awesome Show fakes that aesthetic for laughs, this documentary shows you the real, unbearably earnest thing it's parodying.
A documentary about a broke Wisconsin filmmaker chasing his terrible horror movie with total, heartbreaking sincerity. It shares Awesome Show's fascination with amateur bad art and people who refuse to know they're failing.
But It's a real documentary about a real, struggling person — there's genuine sadness under the laughs that Awesome Show never asks you to feel.
Skinamarink2023
Both mine the same well of deliberately broken video aesthetics and dead air for effect — one aims the discomfort at your funny bone, the other aims it straight at your nervous system.
A horror film shot like a corrupted VHS tape, all wrong angles and dead air, built to induce dread through the same degraded, off-kilter visual language Awesome Show uses for comedy.
But It's nearly plotless and almost unbearably slow — patience-testing in a way that trades laughs entirely for creeping unease.
People
Writing
- Eric WareheimCreator
- Tim HeideckerCreator
Production
- Eric WareheimExecutive Producer
- Tim HeideckerExecutive Producer
Recommended by
The Ernie Kovacs Show, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, The Eric Andre Show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, The Kids in the Hall, Beavis and Butt-Head, Wonder Showzen, The State, Sealab 2021, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, Xavier: Renegade Angel, The Whitest Kids U'Know, Human Giant, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Loiter Squad, Perfect Hair Forever, Superjail!, Important Things with Demetri Martin, 12 oz. Mouse, Beef House, Dream Corp LLC, Stella