Tonight (Sept. 18), Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim return to Adult Swim. This time, though, the duo is doing something a little unexpected. That’s something they discussed going into the project.
Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories isn’t out for laughs the way their previous endeavors, like Tom Goes to the Mayor and Awesome Show, Great Job! were. Gone are the commercial parodies, everyday people as actors and other things people came to expect with Awesome Show. “We just felt like we played that to every angle,” says Heidecker.
There are funny moments in Bedtime Stories, but it’s also pretty terrifying. “We’re not doing spoofs of horror movies,” says Heidecker. “I feel like this is an unsettling, feel-bad comedy show.”
Wareheim says that the show is close in spirit to directors they admire, like David Lynch and Todd Solondz. “Sometimes on the surface it’s just a normal story of, you know, a father and a family,” he says, “but there there’s this undercurrent that this guy is a really fucked-up person. That kind of balance is what we really like to play with.”
Heidecker uses the word “nightmare” a couple times during our interview, and that kind of pacing is what they have achieved in Bedtime Stories. “Hole,” the premiere episode, starts out with an awkward encounter between neighbors. As the 11-and-a-half minute episode progresses, the events grow increasingly more disturbing. By the end, viewers might jump up from the seats. That’s nothing compared to “Toes,” which starts out with a doctor who fulfills unusual requests. Heidecker mentions plastic surgery—”the nonchalantness that we have about cutting things off or adding to our bodies”—as an inspiration for the episode.
“It just felt like it would be fun if there was this world where removing toes was sort of a normal thing,” he says. Sounds gross, but that’s not all of what’s in the episode. It’s just the mild part.