How Much Season 3 of Tires Cost
Another peek inside The Club.
When TV and film productions apply for tax credits, they have to submit various accounting documents which then become subject to public records requests. That’s how I obtained some of SNL’s budget ledgers a few years ago, and it’s how I got ahold of the budget for season 3 of Netflix’s Tires last week. Check it out:
First things first: this is not an unusual budget for a third-season single-cam comedy, and I’m not suggesting as much. In fact, the $31 million budget—about $2.6 million per episode—is on the modest end of things. According to The Ankler, it’s slightly more than multi-cam sitcom budgets, but lower than the $3-5 million per episode budget of a typical broadcast series. For context, The Bear’s first season cost about $3.5 million per episode, which is reportedly how much Insecure cost a decade ago. (At the time, that was expensive for a half-hour comedy.) On the drama side, The Pitt cost between $4-5 million per episode, while Heated Rivalry came in at $3.5 million. In summary: Tires is pretty cheap, well below the $8 million per episode budget that The Ankler describes as the industry’s current sweet spot.
What interests me about the document is the way it illustrates what I argued in my essay about the Comedy Fee Tracker a few weeks ago: that many comedians are functionally CEOs who create and manage hundreds or thousands of jobs. Here we see that Tires co-creator and executive producer Shane Gillis runs a company with hundreds of employees and that he gets paid handsomely for it. The document obviously doesn’t break down individual salaries, and Hollywood accounting is fuzzy enough that I’d be reluctant to guess exactly which buckets contain his fees. Instead, I’ll simply note that he’s an executive producer, writer, and star of a show that spent half its budget on above-the-line costs, including $6.9 million to its talent, $5.9 million to its producers, and $1.5 million to its writers. (Again: I’m not saying that’s bad or unusual, just spelling it out.)
I’m also interested in the bigger story this document represents. As you may recall, Gillis self-financed the first season of Tires before he sold it to Netflix. Clearly that risk paid off. It’s the same risk that Tom Segura took with the pilot of his Netflix series Bad Thoughts, and that Theo Von and David Spade took with their film Busboys. In a time of industrywide contraction, all of these artists—whom we might safely describe as antiwoke—used the money they made from their podcasts and standup tours to buy their way into a business that was otherwise disinvesting in comedy and abdicating its mission to discover new talent. These are the downstream effects of the right-wing comedy renaissance that began during the pandemic.
Seth Simons
One important feature of this renaissance, or maybe more of a fuel source, is the patronage system represented by shows like Tires. Gillis created the show with his friends Steve Gerben and John McKeever, and the cast is a who’s-who of their friends from the Philly and NYC comedy scenes: Andrew Schulz, Chris O’Connor, Tommy Pope, Joe DeRosa, Kerryn Feehan, H. Foley, Stavros Halkias. Busboys, similarly, features Tim Dillon, Bobby Lee, and Kill Tony regulars Kam Patterson, Casey Rocket, and William Montgomery. Much as the Austin comedy scene functions as a jobs program for Joe Rogan’s fellow travelers, these productions offer a mechanism for comics like Gillis to keep their friends paid.
Seth Simons
This isn’t something unique to the Rogan/Gillis crowd. Plenty of shows during the 2010s comedy boom were effectively UCB alumni hiring their friends; SNL has traded spoils for its entire existence. Still, it’s worth observing how well this system serves the other side, too. Remember what Tires cast member Stavros Halkias said last year when Vulture asked him what people “misunderstand” about Gillis:
Halkias: Shane’s one of the best guys of all time. He's just a truly nice person who treats his friends well. I mean, he puts his friends on a fucking net—he gets a sitcom, you don't think famous people could have been at every one of those roles? But he took his friends with him. You know what I mean? That does mean something to me when he treats just anyone really fucking nicely in a way that I've seen people that are not as famous be real pieces of shit.
…
And maybe I'm being naive and sticking my head in the sand and not thinking about—and maybe I am going back to a time where I really think comedians shouldn't have pull, but they fucking do. And maybe I should just admit that to myself. But other than—I don't think—these are not destructive. These guys are not the problem, I don't think. You know what I mean? And they're funny. And as human beings, good guys. And that is important to me just on a personal level. And I think to not go insane, that is how I have to look at things.
And again, like I said, there's a line. There is like if you're outwardly fucking racist, whatever bootlicking, whatever the fuck, I'm sure there's a line with everybody in their personal relationships. But these are just... That's the problem, is that people just put their own beliefs onto these guys, I think.
Halkias is smart enough to know that real pieces of shit can and do treat their friends well; that’s how they get away with being real pieces of shit. (Also, come on—it’s not like Gillis rescued him from poverty by giving him the job. He was already a famous comic!) He’s also smart enough to recognize the evidence that Gillis, like many of his other friends in comedy, is both outwardly racist and a bootlicker, but he’s willing to rationalize it for a guy he likes personally. I’m reminded of Ramy Youssef’s answer when Vulture asked him if it’s fair for the media to classify Andrew Schulz and Tim Dillon as part of the manosphere:
Youssef: Well, I think people have a tendency to kind of lump certain things. So I think look, there are people online that scare me, whether it's the Tates or Fuentes. Look, they don't scare me personally. They make me scared for people. I can watch those things detached with a sense of humor. Look, everything's just gonna make me laugh. Again, I'm watching videos of me and Elmo declaring Jihad, I'm laughing, I gotta tell you. It's just funny—and there's a part of me—but it's funny. So I'm laughing at all of it. But then I can kind of say, all right, I'm seeing real threats in some of these.
Tim Dillon is clearly playing a character. He's very funny. He's very astute. He's very smart. I also did standup with him at The Stand in 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17. Andrew Schulz, same thing. So these are people who not only have I done standup with, but I also watched them build their own empires and they did not get—so I got a sweet deal with Hollywood quickly. These guys didn't. No one would look at them and then now they make more money than everybody else.
Which is just from an underdog perspective, pretty cool. I don't like them being lumped in with the other guys. And it's not just because these are my friends, I just think they're kind of different things.
Total delusion. To believe any of that, you’d have to write off the totality of Dillon and Schulz’s public lives as satirical performances, and then you’d have to ignore pretty much every question about what those performances intended and what they achieved. What’s really impressive is that Youssef says all this without any financial relationship to the chud crowd. This points to the success of the comedy club training ground, where social capital is more important than actual capital: you have to be friends with everyone if you want to work, and you can’t be friends with everyone if you stick too close to your principles.
You can see this effect at work in everyone around Dave Chappelle, another guy who treats his friends well. Here’s what SNL alum Punkie Johnson said about him last year on Caleb Hearon’s So True:
Hearon: I do have an obvious question for you about Dave, which is he's an undeniable legend.
Johnson: Absolutely.
Hearon: But he spent so much of the last several years of his career really going in on this trans stuff. What do you make of it? How does it make you feel?
Johnson: We have several conversations about it. The number one thing about Dave, he's not anti-trans. He's just a fucking idiot. He's not anti-gay, he's not anti-trans. He's not like that. But the problem is once he tell one joke and he get a rise out of people, he will continue to get that rise. He's rebellious in that way. You know what I'm saying? And you have those friendship conversations where you're like, "Come on, man. Come on. Don't do another one, dog."
Hearon: I've had those with comics. Yeah.
Johnson: He going to do what he want to do. He fucking Dave. And it's just like with him, if you know him and you know his heart, you wouldn't take offense to it. But in this climate, I could understand why it's received the way it's received. You know what I'm saying?
Again: delusion! None of it lines up with the actual record of what Chappelle has said, and even if it did, that’s still really bad. So much of modern comedy runs on precisely this cognitive dissonance—that people might say things, horrible things, again and again over a period of years, without believing any of them. It’s a lie that pays very, very well.
Seth Simons
