Eric Wareheim's real work is a way of being uncomfortable on camera: the close-up held too long, the sound that drops out, the product nobody asked for. It is his, it is not for everyone, and in other people's films he is mostly furniture.
Fi1m perspective
The shot goes on too long. That is the first thing to know about anything Eric Wareheim has made with Tim Heidecker: a face in close-up several seconds past the point of comedy, a caption in the font of an office training video, the audio cutting out as if the tape had gone. Tim and Eric Awesome Show (2007–2010) was assembled from the debris of public-access television and the infomercial, and the joke was never a punchline. The joke was that you were still watching.
He met Heidecker studying film at Temple University, and the two have hardly worked apart since: Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004), a limited-animation series in which Wareheim voiced the Mayor; Awesome Show; Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories; Beef House; and their own company, Abso Lutely Productions, formed with Dave Kneebone. The one stretch to feature length, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012), is the work most often marked down, and the complaint, that the style thins out over ninety minutes, seems fair to us. Wareheim's own account of the rules is exact: "darkness, discomfort, confusion and things that shouldn't exist." Consumer culture and men who think well of themselves are the usual targets, and the casting runs to people who do not look like actors and are not asked to.
We have sat through Awesome Show sketches that held a face long after everyone watching with us had stopped laughing, laughed anyway, and then felt cornered by it, which is what was meant. Wareheim has described the whole career as building uncomfortable situations and making people live inside them. It divides audiences, and it is supposed to.
Outside the partnership he has mostly been a hired hand, and an agreeable one. On Master of None (2015), which we rated highly, he played the recurring part of Arnold Baumheiser and directed episodes; the series is Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang's, and our review gave the credit for its warmth to the people around Ansari rather than to any one of them. In Onslaught (2026) he is Kovacks, one of the men who will spend the night in and around the building, and our review, which admired Adam Wingard's control more than his pacing, listed him alongside Reginald VelJohnson and Michael Biehn and had nothing further to say. That is not a slight. The film gave him nothing to do.
Which is the pattern. Put Wareheim in someone else's frame and he fills it pleasantly and leaves no mark. Put him behind a camera with Heidecker and a bad microphone and something odd and specific happens that half the audience will switch off inside a minute. Start with Awesome Show, in short doses, with the lights on. If you get to the end of an episode, the rest is yours.
Biography
Eric Wareheim is an American comedian, actor, writer, director and musician. He is best known as one half of the comedy duo Tim & Eric alongside Tim Heidecker. The pair met while studying at Temple University and went on to create series including Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!.
Wareheim has appeared in and directed episodes of the Netflix series Master of None (2015). He is credited as actor and creator on the series SCUM (2019) and plays Kovacks in the film Onslaught (2026).
