It is exhausting to overstate simply how influential Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have been on comedy. It is exhausting to overstate their impression on popular culture as a complete. After assembly at Temple College, the pair rapidly discovered that their shared humorousness led them to create absurdist and subversive shorts that fairly often undermined and challenged the tenets of the movie and media arts course on which they had been learning (They made a whole thesis movie as regards to cinematic historical past of lobsters). After school, they continued to make sketches and quick movies, which they despatched to a number of individuals within the business, one among whom was Bob Odenkirk.
Commercial
Tim and Eric had a hilarious methodology for convincing Odenkirk to work with them, which concerned sending the “Mr. Show” star a DVD of their sketches alongside signed headshots and an bill charging Odenkirk for the pleasure. Their boldness labored and Odenkirk invited the pair to Los Angeles, the place they in the end moved to begin work on their initiatives beneath the steerage of their newfound mentor.
Since that second, Tim and Eric proceeded to form massive elements of the tradition we see round us right now. Their absurdist Adult Swim comedy sketch present “Tim & Eric Superior Show, Nice Job!” stays one of many funniest and most essential comedy sequence ever produced, influencing not solely a era of comedians, however a method of enhancing that has since change into ubiquitous, and stems from the really distinctive model of editor and frequent Tim & Eric collaborator Doug Lussenhop (aka DJ Douggpound).
Commercial
Tim and Eric additionally created, wrote, and directed the “Bedtime Tales” sequence for Adult Swim (one of many few channels nonetheless making TV that feels harmful), and have since gone on to chart careers as actors and administrators in their very own proper, with Heidecker launching a profitable music profession and Wareheim increasing into pure wine manufacturing. But between their preliminary assembly with Odenkirk and their cult traditional Adult Swim sketch present, there’s one other, typically ignored sequence that marked the pair’s first TV effort: “Tom Goes to the Mayor.”
Tom Goes to the Mayor was the primary Tim and Eric TV present
“Tom Goes to the Mayor,” very like loads of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s work, form of defies description. The present truly started as an internet cartoon on timanderic.com, however Odenkirk introduced it to Adult Swim as a possible debut TV undertaking for his new discoveries. It had a unfastened premise which centered on Tom Peters (Heidecker), who having simply moved to the city of Jefferton, regularly visits the mayor (Wareheim) with varied concepts for the native space. The mayor sometimes makes ridiculous modifications to Tom’s authentic plans, inflicting them to misfire in some terrible and hilarious approach.
Commercial
The TV model of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” premiered on Adult Swim on November 14, 2004, operating for 30 episodes till September 25, 2006. It was basically an animated sitcom with temporary moments of stay-motion sketch comedy interspersed. But its animation model was in contrast to the rest, in that it used images of the solid in several poses, which the editors filtered utilizing Photoshop’s “photocopy” filter, giving the stills a definite blue and white coloration. These had been then stitched collectively as an example a pre-recorded voice monitor.
In 2025, Wareheim known as into Heidecker’s “Office Hours” podcast for the twentieth anniversary of “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” and Doug Lussenhop, who labored on the present as an editor, recalled how the episodes had been made. “I simply bear in mind there have been so many images of Tim,” he mentioned. “There was a library of poses and stuff, so they’d give us a radio play and we needed to put in all of the poses.”
Commercial
The present as a complete was very a lot a studying expertise for everybody concerned, not least Tim and Eric, who had been very a lot Hollywood outsiders — a indisputable fact that helped their humor to be as razor sharp because it was. “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” nevertheless, wasn’t fairly the seminal sequence that “Superior Show” proved to be. That mentioned, it was extremely essential as a stepping stone, and even featured a number of of the characters that might finally wind up on “Superior Show” (which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2017,) together with the Channel 5 Married Information Group and the Cinco Firm.
Tom Goes to the Mayor is an ignored traditional
“Tom Goes to the Mayor” may not have confirmed as influential as “Superior Show,” nevertheless it was an essential second for Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in that it helped crystallize a lot of their model. Throughout the “Workplace Hours” celebration of “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” Wareheim recalled how within the early days of improvement, he and Heidecker visited a restaurant throughout the road from their LA workplace and noticed a sight that appeared emblematic of their strategy to the sequence. “I bear in mind one man, he took all of the meals from Sizzler,” he mentioned, including:
Commercial
“He had an enormous mound of meals, and he sat down with a glass of water. He dumped out the water and began scraping meals into this cup, a giant 40 ounce cup, and stirring it. And we had been watching him in horror, and he simply begins ingesting that meals water. I used to be like, ‘That is our present. That is precisely just like the nightmares you see day-after-day.'”
The duo arguably would not have perfected this form of nightmarish tone with “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” however they began to hone it with that present. Jefferton, for instance, was the grim Sizzler tableau expanded into a whole city, with dilapidated shops and strip malls lining the streets.
The sequence itself proved to be fairly polarizing upon its debut. In response to the contentious debates amongst Adult Swim followers over the primary season, govt Mike Lazzo instructed Today, “I simply bear in mind early on after we put out ‘Aqua Teen [Hunger Force],’ individuals hated it: ‘That is silly, this character is imply.’ That modified in a season. We hope the identical factor occurs with ‘Tom’ as individuals get extra used to that model, that humor, that look.”
Commercial
Sadly, “Tom Goes to the Mayor” would not final previous a second season, however contemplating it launched two of essentially the most attention-grabbing — and I’d argue, essential — careers in comedy, it stays a really important piece of Adult Swim historical past