![]() To make “Beef House” feel more like a real sitcom, they shot on cameras used for “Fuller House.” They hired the same person “Fuller House” used to mix their laugh tracks, too. The pair welcomed the push to go beyond a simple “goof on sitcoms,” Heidecker said. The scripts would read as they might “on a sitcom on NBC,” he added, but would accrue that warped “extra layer” once Heidecker and Wareheim brought it to life. “The challenge that we presented to them was, ‘Hey, can you write this where it plays funny as a straightforward sitcom but still has the Tim and Eric sensibility in it?’” Newman said. Newman thought the idea could be pushed a little. Newman, head of program development: They wanted to do a sitcom, but make it twisted. Heidecker and Wareheim have been working with Adult Swim for over 15 years, and their “Beef House” pitch was fairly simple, said Walter J. “‘I had to make sure that they were OK with this kind of humor before I was going to continue the relationship.’” “People would be like, ‘I met my girlfriend or I met my boyfriend because of you guys,’” Heidecker said. were a reminder of their status as a litmus test among the comedy cognoscenti. On a recent comedy tour, audience comments during the Q. Reilly, Jeff Goldblum and Will Forte.Īsk people if they know about Tim and Eric, and you’re likely to be met with either a blank stare or a conspiratorial flash of recognition: This person gets it. They got a break in the early aughts, when Bob Odenkirk agreed to executive produce their first series for Adult Swim, “Tom Goes to the Mayor.” Regular guests on “Awesome Show,” which played as half conceptual-art project, half public-access spoof, included Zach Galifianakis, John C. ![]() That approach has served them well in the more than two decades they’ve been collaborating. “Our whole career, we’ve set up these situations that are very uncomfortable that people are forced to live in and experience.” “One of the greatest things about this sitcom is that we don’t really explain why it’s called the Beef House, why we all live there, why my wife would put up with that kind of stuff,” he said. And in place of the traditional family are two middle-aged men named Tim and Eric three elderly men of indeterminate relation to one another a young boy, who shows up later in the series and Eric’s wife, Megan, a sexually and intellectually frustrated police detective. Jokes can be corny, but self-consciously so almost always, they bear a vague but unmistakable stamp of something more grotesque. ![]() Episodes of “Beef House” are about 11 minutes long. (Infer your own connotations.) The series itself, which Heidecker and Wareheim wrote, directed and star in, is a bit easier to define, at least superficially: a bizarre spoof of family sitcoms, complete with laugh tracks, “aThe living-room couch is its center of gravity.īut that’s about where the similarities with classic family sitcoms end. In the show’s world, it’s a term whose meaning is taken for granted, used to describe the house full of dudes at its center. Wareheim was calling from his own home in Los Angeles, where he’d been hanging with his cats. He was calling from his mother’s place in Southern California. “Should we do some comedy for you?” Heidecker asked. On a mutually sequestered afternoon last week - with the new show in the offing and press interviews relegated to Skype - the description also characterized a three-way conversation, in which everyone was a little stir crazy but seemingly grateful for something fun to talk about. It made cult heroes out of its two creators, better known as simply Tim and Eric, whose new series, “Beef House,” officially premieres on Adult Swim just after midnight Sunday (and after a surprise online debut of the pilot a week early). That description could just as easily fit “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,” the innovative and vaguely disturbing sketch comedy-cum-video art series that ran on Adult Swim from 2007 to 2010. But as anyone familiar with the comedy of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim would appreciate, there was something almost too appropriate about having to view their faces as degraded images on a stuttering, grainy video stream amid a general feeling of discomfort.
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