Self-iso­late with On Cin­e­ma at the Cinema

There’s noth­ing quite like On Cin­e­ma. Con­coct­ed by come­di­ans Tim Hei­deck­er (of alter­na­tive com­e­dy duo Tim & Eric fame) and Gregg Turk­ing­ton (step­ping away from his Neil Ham­burg­er stand-up per­sona) while liv­ing togeth­er in Brook­lyn dur­ing the film­ing of 2012’s The Com­e­dy, it start­ed with a very sim­ple premise. They want­ed to riff on tooth­less pod­cast­ers and the fast-turn­around, sound­bite crit­i­cism of mod­ern film reviews. Instead, things went a lit­tle differently.

On Cin­e­ma at the Cin­e­ma began as an inde­pen­dent­ly pro­duced pod­cast, before mor­ph­ing into a web series through com­e­dy site Thing X, even­tu­al­ly air­ing on TV when the site was acquired by Adult Swim in 2013. Since then, the show has expand­ed into its own extend­ed uni­verse, con­sist­ing of the orig­i­nal pod­cast, the TV series, annu­al two- to three-hour-long Oscar spe­cials, an in-joke spin-off series called Deck­er, Tim’s fake hard rock band Dekkar (which itself evolved into EDM exper­i­ment DKR), an entire tele­vised fake mur­der tri­al (The Tri­al of Tim Hei­deck­er, which can be logged on Let­ter­boxd), all lead­ing up to 2019’s fea­ture-length mock­u­men­tary Mis­ter America.

This doesn’t even account for the numer­ous in-show ven­tures and plot­lines (includ­ing Tim’s brain surgery and Gregg’s sub­sum­ing of the Vic­torville Film Archive). But let’s not get ahead of our­selves. In the show, Tim and Gregg play absurd, nar­cis­sis­tic ver­sions of them­selves, giv­ing their pop­corn bag rat­ings scale to most­ly ter­ri­ble movies they’ve like­ly nev­er even actu­al­ly watched. While Tim plays him­self as a right-wing, flag-wor­ship­ping, con­spir­a­cy-addled doo­fus, Gregg styles his per­sona as a pas­sion­ate – if not painful­ly des­per­ate – cinephile, whose procla­ma­tions of ​“film buff” sta­tus are at odds with his con­sis­tent­ly-proven lack of cin­e­mat­ic knowledge.

Both Tim and Gregg want to be in con­trol of On Cin­e­ma, but it con­sis­tent­ly goes off the rails. The focus of the show invari­ably switch­es between Tim’s errat­ic, often life-threat­en­ing per­son­al trou­bles and Gregg’s insis­tence on ​“get­ting back to the movies,” an endeav­our which is con­stant­ly dis­missed by Tim. The two men seem to only loathe each oth­er, but they appar­ent­ly have no one else. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing, tox­ic dynam­ic that man­i­fests itself absurd­ly in their reviews and numer­ous oth­er sub­plots. The draw of the show is less about watch­ing them give fun­ny fake reviews of bad movies than becom­ing immersed in the lore of these characters.

The show also has an impas­sioned fol­low­ing on Twit­ter; fans play along with the sto­ry­lines and label them­selves as either ​“Tim­heads” or ​“Greg­gheads” depend­ing on who they side with. If you’re accus­tomed to the stylings of oth­er Tim & Eric projects, well, it’s not real­ly any­thing like that. Every­thing here is almost entire­ly impro­vised, lean­ing main­ly on dry, uncom­fort­able humour that takes a while to ful­ly accli­mate to. The entire­ty of the show can be accessed on YouTube, Adult Swim, and also, hand­i­ly, on the offi­cial On Cin­e­ma Time­line web­site. We look for­ward to you join­ing the On Cin­e­ma Family.