Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's breakthrough series, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has all the blurry charm and low-rent production value of a 2 a.m. cable access program, and their seizure-inducing editing can often be tough to stomach. Audiences quickly discovered, though, that Awesome Show revels in the mind-numbing banality of contemporary life. The show's early seasons derived humor from treating grade-Z entertainers, including pervy ventriloquist David Liebe Hart and glossy-lipped comic James Quall, like actual stars, and from exploiting the inanity of morning newscasts with passive-aggressive married anchors and recurring characters Jan and Wayne Skylar. The show's increasing popularity and go-for-broke mentality attracted big-name talents such as Jeff Goldblum and David Cross, and Oscar-winner John C. Reilly even landed a spin-off series, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, for his bizarre turn as the uneducated, advice-dispensing pseudo-physician. Awesome Show's hilariously insane commercials for Cinco, a fake company whose unnecessary products actually do more harm than good, have a 1990s as-seen-on-TV appeal and gleefully skewer advertising and consumer culture. With characters who embody both uncomfortable comedy and flat-out desperation, as well as an appealingly anarchic worldview, Tim and Eric Awesome, Great Job! is purposefully juvenile comedy that's disturbingly thought-provoking.