Netflix has acquired a series by the controversial former Saturday Night Live member, Shane Gillis.
The streaming service announced on February 26th that it will be releasing Tires, the six-episode series starring the controversial comedian Gillis. The American company has also ordered the second standup special from him following the success of 2023’s Beautiful Dogs.
Tires follows Steven Gerben’s Will, who is tormented by cousin and employee Shane – played by Gillis – after he inherits his father’s old chain of auto-repair shops. The show has been written and co-created by Gillis, who is known for being sacked from SNL in 2019 for previously using racial slurs on a podcast.
At the time, Gillis was hired as one of three new cast members for the 45th season of NBC’s flagship comedy programme alongside Bowen Yang and Cloe Fineman. However, shortly after the casting was announced, clips surfaced of the comedian using racial slurs and making racist jokes on a 2018 episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. Following this, clips from other podcasts were brought to light, showing similar offensive behaviour from Gillis, including homophobic jibes.
Following the clips coming to the fore, Gillis tried to defend himself on Twitter, saying, “I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries” and that “if you go through my ten years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of bad misses. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.” However, four days later, a spokesperson for SNL co-creator Lorne Michaels confirmed Gillis had been removed from the show only days before season 45 premiered.
Following the controversy, Gillis maintained that although the clips made him look terrible, they were taken out of context, and he was misquoted by many outlets commenting on the story. He asserted that he regretted the Twitter statement about pushing boundaries, blaming it on having “literally 5 minutes of being pressured to write anything” before officially retracting it and calling it “corny”.
However, Gillis was recently asked back to SNL for February 24th’s episode. “I was fired from this show a while ago,” he commented in his opening monologue. “Don’t look that up, please. Please don’t Google that. It’s fine. Don’t even worry about it. I probably shouldn’t be up here honestly. I should be at home. I should be a high school football coach.”
Watch Gillis’ SNL monologue below.
