TGIF Goes Rancid in Tim and Eric’s Sitcom Parody Beef House
Image courtesy of Adult Swim
Beef House is the first Tim and Eric show to feel too familiar. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have built their careers on upending expectations and conventional notions of comedy. They’re equally at ease playing with tropes, stereotypes and stock formulas as they are blowing everything up and producing something barely even recognizable as comedy, but the end result is something that’s always unmistakably Tim and Eric.
Beef House reaches that point, too, in time. This bitter parody of ‘80s and ‘90s sitcoms—particularly Miller-Boyett Productions’ raft of “TGIF” sitcoms for ABC—has the tonal qualities and absurd angles you’d expect from Tim and Eric. Still, it’s hard to watch it and not think about Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett’s similar parodies for Saturday Night Live, or Bojack Horseman’s ‘80s sitcom Horsin’ Around, or even Adult Swim’s own Too Many Cooks. The four-camera setup, the laugh track, the intentionally unfunny lines, the cliched scenarios, the bland and anonymous suburban home: Beef House hits every note you’d expect from this kind of parody, and at first it seems like an unusually obvious and uninspired misstep from the two.
Tim and Eric costar as good buddies who now share a house with Eric’s wife (Jamie-Lynn Sigler, from The Sopranos) and three other friends (conventionally unconventional Tim and Eric collaborators Ron Austar, Tennessee Luke and Ben Hur). The five men call Eric’s well-appointed house the Beef House, and are known collectively as the Beef Boys, and no, neither name is ever explained, at least during the first two episodes. Austar, Luke and Hur all have the kind of outsider-y, non-actor amateurism you expect from Tim and Eric’s shows, and initially they seem like an aside in both episodes—a bit of superfluous weirdness on the edges of the show that exists solely to connect Beef House to Tim and Eric’s previous work.