‘Tires’ Season Two Proves Shane Gillis Actually Cares

The second season of Tires keeps returning to a low-level conflict between Shane (Shane Gillis) and his manager/cousin Will (Steve Gerben). As Will jockeys for position in the tire chain they both work for, he reminds Shane that if Will is able to move up to general manager, their location will need to replace him. Will keeps trying to set Shane up to show he can do it: telling Shane he’s in charge when Will has to leave for a meeting; inviting him to participate in a training session by an outside HR consultant. Shane spends most of the season refusing these opportunities, not wanting to get caught actually caring about, well, anything, but particularly not work. Based on the evidence on screen, however, Gillis has a lot more career ambition than his fictional avatar.

Tires, which Gillis co-created and the show’s brief first season reveals that Will’s father Jon (Peter Reeves) is exploring the possibility of selling the chain, Shane and Will manage to pull together and convince Jon that they know what they’re doing. 

Any fans who might have feared Season Two would be about Shane in his responsible era will be reassured when, very early on in the premiere, we see Shane holding his mechanic colleague Cal (Chris O’Connor) at gunpoint, taunting him that it’s not loaded, or is it? The shop’s been doing well enough that everyone got bonuses. While Shane spent his on this handgun — which loses its appeal for him when the “wops” from the used car dealership next door mock it as a “lady gun” — the quietly competent Cal bought himself a smartwatch. (Shane: “You love the government keeping tabs on you.”) 

Will has big plans for growth that require securing a $750,000 bank loan. When he comes to collect Jon for the meeting and walks in on general manager Dave (Stavros Halkias) cheating on his wife with receptionist Lisa (Alexa Albanese), Dave sneers that the proof Jon doesn’t care about Will’s goals is that he hasn’t asked Dave to come to the bank with them. Though a different kind of character would be ashamed in this moment, Dave is defiant: “Other guys can’t balance an affair and work. They let their responsibilities go to the wind. Not me, I get pussy here.” In other words: Even with its recent success, Valley Forge still mostly exists to occupy failsons and deviants who would be unemployable anywhere else.

That may also be true of Tires, but if the scrappy Season One was primarily a make-work project for Gillis’s buddies, Season Two feels like a real show a real company spent real money on. It’s twice as long, for starters. Whereas the scripts in the first season were credited to Gillis and his series co-creators Gerben and John McKeever (the latter of whom also directs every episode), now there’s an actual writing staff, including stand-up comic Joe DeRosa, who also appears in Season Two as the manager of another Valley Forge location. Several episodes feature guest stars you’ve actually heard of, like Vince Vaughn, Jon Lovitz and stand-up comic Ron White. The action frequently leaves the tire shop, and considering how seldom that was true in the first season, a tire expo with multiple booths and dozens of extras represents such a leap that it might as well be outer space. Will’s dad is a much bigger presence, giving dimension to his relationship with Will. We also meet Shane’s father Phil (Thomas Haden Church) and get some idea as to what made Shane such a determined trifler despite the professional talents he pretends not to possess. 

And while Shane, like all the show’s characters, was sort of ambiently horny in the first season, the second gives him a multi-episode love interest in the charmingly sardonic Kelly (Veronika Slowikowska). Sure, we get an episode where Will’s penalty for losing at the shop’s version of Horse is to wear a long, feminine wig for a full workday, and another in which Dave is repeatedly wrecked in a sales-event dunk tank, but around those comic setpieces, characters are dealing with real emotional stakes. Really!

A show like Tires was never going to be mentioned in the same breath as prestige-y stalwarts like Hacks or Only Murders in the Building, but at its best, it’s like a contemporary Clerks, intimately familiar with the kind of antisocial crap guys can get up to at a job that doesn’t occupy all their mental energy. It seems obvious to say about a character who shares his first name, but Gillis really knows the fictional Shane. Thought has been put into how far Shane is willing to go to mess with Will and at what point he should pull back in order not to make a mistake no one can come back from. In his personal life, there’s psychological realism in the way he relates to the largely absent Phil, from which we can draw a straight line to Shane psyching himself up to call Kelly after a fight and muttering “I don’t even care, I don’t care at all” to himself as he waits for her to pick up. Shane is a compelling character and Gillis could not be more natural playing him.

Which is why it’s such a bummer when he dips into such faded edgelord language as the “r” slur or using “gay” as an insult. This is a show that’s just a few more tweaks away from being something I could recommend unreservedly, and it’s depressing to think there’s a segment of the viewing audience that will cheer when this hate speech gets casually tossed around — probably the same segment that has only positive associations for Schulz, back in Season Two as “wop” neighbor Andy. 

But if the slurs disappeared, would that segment really miss them? In Season Three, I’d love to find out.