I wrote this for a friend on a lark several weeks ago. Last night, I felt a hankering to write about On Cinema at the Cinema, which I'm fairly obsessed with, and felt like I'd be retreading too much of this piece's ground, so here, have this one instead!

The comedy of Tim Heidecker and many of those affiliated with him—Eric Wareheim, Gregg Turkington, and Nathan Fielder in particular—is best thought of as a satire of degradation. It has two defining qualities: a belief that much of what makes up our culture these days is empty, meaningless garbage, coupled by an embrace of that garbage, a loving fidelity to it, a celebration of those garbage things that, precisely because of its love, makes that garbage impossible to defend as meaningful in any way. It is the love of its meaninglessness, peculiarly, that robs it of the pretense of any meaning.

Tim and Eric have said several times in the past that, in many ways, “The Jim and Derrick Show” was the episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! that exposed the true intent of their comedy. “Jim and Derrick” completely eschews the usual sketch-a-minute surrealism of Awesome Show and focuses, instead, on a long-form parody of (and homage to?) MTV programming: a fake-grunge aesthetic that favors blatant misogyny, gross visuals, and weed references, layered on top of “sketch comedy” that’s almost offensively half-hearted and uninspired. Their 11-minute episode includes a guest host in the form of a porn star, an interview with Elisha Cuthbert that’s more an uncomfortable attempt to hit on her than anything remotely “about her”, and an in-studio DJ whose sole occupation seems to involve layering stupid sounds on top of one another.

What makes “Jim and Derrick” work is that it’s barely a satire: Tim and Eric were able to recreate MTV’s aesthetic so precisely because MTV’s aesthetic consists of a series of crude and half-assed ideas. There’s no substance to it, no purpose, no ideology. The only intent of any kind is: fill space, sell products. And the genius of Tim’s work across his various long-form projects is that “fill space, sell products” has increasingly become the mandate of our time, whether we’re talking about TV programming or political punditry or indie folk one-hit wonders. When you look at America through the lens of “How much of this exists to fulfill and exploit a ‘need’ for content?” it becomes clear that 99% of what’s out there is, in a literal sense, landfill: actual garbage, actual waste, designed to exist in a space for no reason than that that space, for similarly trash reasons, exists.

It may seem a little strange that Tim is surprisingly active in leftist, Marxist political circles, but this same perspective on our culture is a dominant thread in leftist critiques of capitalism: that, rather than optimizing the ways in which we fulfill our needs, capitalism manufactures fake needs, and slowly bleeds us dry, siphoning wealth increasingly to the billionaire owners of capital and replacing our culture with a crude simulacrum of what we once had. Genuine youth culture is co-opted and becomes a marketing concern; rock and roll is replaced with a bloodless, vampiric version of itself; cinema is replaced with Marvel blockbuster replicants of cinema. (It’s no surprise that Marvel directors are obsessed with Heidecker’s On Cinema at the Cinema.) Every generation of politician is more artificial than the last, to the point that new politicians don’t even pretend to care about policy, focusing instead on stoking grievances and “scoring points” in culture wars that are only meaningful inasmuch as they occasionally inspire people to shoot one another. Awesome Showwas ahead of its time in this sense, because it began depicting society this way well ahead of any more mainstream comedies. (And it’s worth pointing out that Tim and Eric’s pre-Awesome Show project, Tom Goes to the Mayor, was explicitly a show about a dead strip-mall town whose titular mayor actively foils all attempts to make it remotely more livable.)

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! was a potpourri of satires, targeting “television culture” with a broad enough brush to touch upon children’s television programming, infomercials, various kinds of advertisement, and of course public access television, which in many ways is the ne plus ultra of consumerist waste, pushed to such a harmless extreme that it becomes lovable in its own way. Check It Out!pushes the public access obsession to an extreme, largely because John C. Reilly’s Steve Brule was such a virtuosic comic figure that he deserved room to breathe and grow. Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories is a perverse anomaly, which keeps to the beats and rhythms of horror filmmaking while substituting its content for the sorts of dumb ghost stories eight-year-olds make up for each other to gross each other out; the result is deeply unsettling, on levels that even horror usually isn’t. And Tim & Eric’s latest collaboration, Beef House, is a multicam sitcom, fully laugh-tracked, that… mainly is just a multicam sitcom, which is already such a degraded medium that they barely need to push beyond where The Big Bang Theory already goes.

On Cinema at the Cinema, with Gregg Turkington rather than Eric Wareheim, is less a singular project than it is a universe of associated low-quality content landfills. While it revolves around a movie review podcast and show whose hosts are two unique kinds of uninformed about movies, the running subtext of On Cinema is its constant embrace of other zero-content content: different seasons center around subjects like acupuncture, book publishing, nutritional supplements, high-end cinema-dining concepts, VR, corporate America, political conspiracy, or right-wing gun culture, to name some (but not all) of its fleeting grifts. It includes a feature-length documentary about a vanity political campaign, a hackneyed Tom Clancy-esque action series, and of course a five-hour courtroom drama which solely cast actors with actual legal experience and instructed them to carry on as if this was a genuine court case. It’s a blend of Heidecker’s embrace of garbage culture and Gregg Turkington’s obsession with what he’s called workmanlike entertainers: the sorts of people who do mundane, repetitive work in the entertainment industry, without ever breaking out or becoming famous. (Turkington’s other major comic creation, Neil Hamburger, is a three-decade long exploration of a terrible stand-up comic who largely books shows with hostile audiences of a dozen or two people at most; Hamburger is at once repulsive and melancholy, which lent his “hack comic performs big band covers of pop music” album a strangely touching gravitas.)

Some people find Heidecker’s work generally off-putting; people who expect it to work more straightforwardly as comedy, rather than as a satire first and foremost, often see it as cheap or lazy, because they’re expecting something more focused on direct joke output than Heidecker intends to offer. (This is a common critique of satirists; I remember finding Dr. Strangelove stultifying as a teen because it didn’t seem to have jokes the same way that, say, Mel Brooks productions did.) The people who click the most with Heidecker tend to either have direct familiarity with the mediums he’s critiquing, or are alienated enough from society that they find solace in a body of work that largely says: “You’re not wrong. All of this is completely shit.” But leaving approach or targets aside, there’s a bigger reason why Heidecker has become one of the most influential forces in comedy: the man works hard, has immaculate taste, and is imaginative and subtle in ways that belie the crassness of his overall presentation. (I recall an interview with Tim and Eric where they talked scornfully about how many people attempted to steal Awesome Show’s hyperkinetic approach, because all they saw was the cheapness and laziness of the content Awesome Show was satirizing. They are rightfully proud of their work, and seem genuinely offended by people who “pay them tribute” by producing cheap knockoffs, assuming that this is the nature of the original work.)

If you’re genuinely looking to appreciate Heidecker’s work, it’s important to start by thinking of it on its own terms. It’s very funny, but it has to be seen as a satire, rather than as any broader sort of comedy: it has a target, and it celebrates and condemns that target in equal measure. The celebration is the condemnation, in fact: whereas many critiques of culture fail because they’re too dignified to more than sniff at the thing they’re lampooning, the wholehearted embrace of whatever Heidecker happens to be tearing holes in is what lends his work a legitimacy, a sense of genuine reality, a weight. A part of what makes his work so enjoyable is its fidelity to detail: it’s awful in the ways the original work was awful, but it’s awful with such an attention to subtle variations, riffs on a theme, that it never gets repetitive or feels lazy. It’s remarkable how many seasons of On Cinema exist, and how delightful its reviews still manage to be, given that they all follow the same theme of “uninformed enthusiasm.” (Heidecker’s approach to comedy feels more jazzlike than most comedy does, relying as it does on studied attention to variation within a form—and I suspect that people who find him tedious or off-putting do so for the same reasons that many people find jazz absolutely intolerable.)

In a weird way, Heidecker’s work is enjoyable for the same reason The Room is so enjoyable, but more so because it’s created so artfully and intentionally. An episode of Awesome Show is dedicated to Tommy Wiseau, and it’s clear that Tim and Eric not only love The Room but see a kind of accidental kinship with it. The Room is delightful because it consists of a man making, terribly, a movie which would have been terrible even had it been slickly and brilliantly made; in his failings, he exposes the nature of the product he intended to make in a way that that product is typically designed to hide from us, or keep us from thinking about. It’s hard to intentionally make something terrible, but I was struck, watching Decker (the On Cinema parody of action features), by the thought that it might be the only thing which does The Room better and more virtuosically than even The Room does. It never hits quite the same level of balls-to-the-wall weirdness, but it makes up for that with the consistent imagination of its awfulness, its dedication to the wrong details.

What keeps me coming back to Awesome Show and On Cinema, more than anything, is its craft. In the end, I love it for the same reason I love most of what I love: it is ingenious and heartfelt, crafted by a group of people who sincerely, sincerely care about making a good thing. That’s the ultimate irony of Heidecker’s work: whether it’s parodying the endless emptiness of television or the narcissistic delusions of “content creators,” telling juvenile spooky stories or simply watching John C. Reilly spin off into an incoherent world of his own making, his work feels like a recolonization of the most toxic regions of our society. It’s like he sets out to go to the most radiated places on earth and, using only what he finds there, builds something genuinely nourishing out of it, something that points to the possibility of a better world. Just like Neil Cicierega commits atrocities to pop music in ways that somehow yield stranger and more interesting songs, or like Nathan Fielder exposes something deeply human about his subjects precisely by approaching them in an outwardly sociopathic manner, the heart of Tim Heidecker’s work belies what it pretends to be. Which is why everything he’s worked on, from “The Jim and Derrick Show” onwards, is so scathing and damning. It’s not that he tries to pull away from what’s happening. It’s that he sees it all too clearly. In his embrace, he makes it impossible to avoid.