TV & Beyond on 2025-05-11 20:45:00

Tim and Eric had a hilarious method for convincing Odenkirk to work with them, which involved sending the “Mr. Show” star a DVD of their sketches alongside signed headshots and an invoice charging Odenkirk for the pleasure. Their boldness worked and Odenkirk invited the pair to Los Angeles, where they ultimately moved to start work on their projects under the guidance of their newfound mentor.

Since that moment, Tim and Eric proceeded to shape large parts of the culture we see around us today. Their absurdist Adult Swim comedy sketch show “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” remains one of the funniest and most important comedy series ever produced, influencing not only a generation of comedians, but a style of editing that has since become ubiquitous, and stems from the truly unique style of editor and frequent Tim & Eric collaborator Doug Lussenhop (aka DJ Douggpound).

Tim and Eric also created, wrote, and directed the “Bedtime Stories” series for Adult Swim (one of the few channels still making TV that feels dangerous), and have since gone on to chart careers as actors and directors in their own right, with Heidecker launching a successful music career and Wareheim expanding into natural wine production. But between their initial meeting with Odenkirk and their cult classic Adult Swim sketch show, there’s another, often overlooked series that marked the pair’s first TV effort: “Tom Goes to the Mayor.”

Tom Goes to the Mayor was the first Tim and Eric TV show

Tim Heidecker kneels with dogs around him in Tom Goes to the Mayor

Adult Swim

“Tom Goes to the Mayor,” much like a lot of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s work, sort of defies description. The show actually began as a web cartoon on timanderic.com, but Odenkirk brought it to Adult Swim as a potential debut TV project for his new discoveries. It had a loose premise which focused on Tom Peters (Heidecker), who having just moved to the town of Jefferton, frequently visits the mayor (Wareheim) with various ideas for the local area. The mayor typically makes ridiculous changes to Tom’s original plans, causing them to misfire in some awful and hilarious way.

The TV version of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” premiered on Adult Swim on November 14, 2004, running for 30 episodes until September 25, 2006. It was essentially an animated sitcom with brief moments of live-action sketch comedy interspersed. But its animation style was unlike anything else, in that it used photographs of the cast in different poses, which the editors filtered using Photoshop’s “photocopy” filter, giving the stills a distinct blue and white coloration. These were then stitched together to illustrate a pre-recorded voice track.

In 2025, Wareheim called into Heidecker’s “Office Hours” podcast for the 20th anniversary of “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” and Doug Lussenhop, who worked on the show as an editor, recalled how the episodes were made. “I just remember there were so many photos of Tim,” he said. “There was a library of poses and stuff, so they would give us a radio play and we had to put in all the poses.”

The show as a whole was very much a learning experience for everyone involved, not least Tim and Eric, who were very much Hollywood outsiders — a fact that helped their humor to be as razor sharp as it was. “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” however, wasn’t quite the seminal series that “Awesome Show” proved to be. That said, it was incredibly important as a stepping stone, and even featured several of the characters that would eventually wind up on “Awesome Show” (which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2017,) including the Channel 5 Married News Team and the Cinco Company.

Tom Goes to the Mayor is an overlooked classic

Tim Heidecker sits at a desk next to a pen with horses in Tom Goes to the Mayor

Adult Swim

“Tom Goes to the Mayor” might not have proven as influential as “Awesome Show,” but it was an important moment for Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in that it helped crystallize much of their style. During the “Office Hours” celebration of “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” Wareheim recalled how in the early days of development, he and Heidecker visited a restaurant across the street from their LA office and saw a sight that seemed emblematic of their approach to the series. “I remember one man, he took all the food from Sizzler,” he said, adding:

“He had a huge mound of food, and he sat down with a glass of water. He dumped out the water and started scraping food into this cup, a big 40 ounce cup, and stirring it. And we were watching him in horror, and he just starts drinking that food water. I was like, ‘This is our show. This is exactly like the nightmares you see every day.'”

The duo arguably wouldn’t have perfected this sort of nightmarish tone with “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” but they started to hone it with that show. Jefferton, for example, was the grim Sizzler tableau expanded into an entire town, with dilapidated stores and strip malls lining the streets.

The series itself proved to be quite polarizing upon its debut. In response to the contentious debates among Adult Swim fans over the first season, executive Mike Lazzo told Today, “I just remember early on when we put out ‘Aqua Teen [Hunger Force],’ people hated it: ‘This is stupid, this character is mean.’ That changed in a season. We hope the same thing happens with ‘Tom’ as people get more used to that style, that humor, that look.”

Sadly, “Tom Goes to the Mayor” wouldn’t last past a second season, but considering it launched two of the most interesting — and I would argue, important — careers in comedy, it remains a truly essential piece of Adult Swim history

TV & Beyond on 2025-05-11 20:45:00

Tom Goes to the Mayor was the first Tim and Eric TV show

Tom Goes to the Mayor is an overlooked classic

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