InQuire Recommends: Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories

The comedic duo of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have spent the last ten years creating some of the most bewildering content to ever grace American television. Their previous show, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! was a bizarre showcase of bad taste television full of intentional bad acting, low production values and gross-out humour. Green screen backdrops, tacky visuals and Craigslist non-actors might not seem like the perfect combination for a comedy show, but it turned out to be some of the most strangely hilarious television in years.

Now they’ve turned their sights to horror with their new anthology show, Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. It’s been compared by the creators to the Twilight Zone, and for good reason. Each episode focuses on a different disturbing story while retaining the absurd sense of humour that Tim and Eric have built a career on. The cast of characters are broad parodies of cut-out television tropes: the low-brow sitcom character, the teen pop-star, the struggling actor. But all these clichés have been twisted out of shape and distorted beyond recognition to fit within the Tim and Eric universe.

The show boasts an impressive cast of actors for those unfamiliar with Tim and Eric’s work. Zach Galifianakis stars as one of three men who live in a men’s public rest-room in the sitcom parody, “Bathroom Boys”. Jason Schwartzman plays a fictional version of himself who decides to endorse a product while sedated by a sleep-inducing drug to save face, but pays the price when the advertisement makes him look like a “dink”. John C. Reilly features as an alienated man who invests in a self-improvement programme called “Be a Baby” and is promptly humiliated.

But the stand-out episode of the series is “Roommates”, a pitch-perfect parody of the insufferable hip Hollywood type. Tim and Eric’s characters spend their days speaking broken Spanish to one-another, sipping Cappuccinos and saying things like: “I gotta get a viral video of this”.

The show is pretty unconventional in it’s approach to horror and comedy, but it’s an interesting experiment in blurring the lines between the two genres. There are no terrifying jumps, no cut-and-dry jokes, but Tim and Eric have created something that really gets under your skin and stays there. Go into Bedtime Stories expecting everything and nothing, and you’re sure to get a few spooks and goofs out of it.

Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories is available for streaming on adultswim.com