TVSquad

(S02E02) This episode will air Sunday night on Adult Swim, but you can catch it over at the Adult Swim Fix site now. This episode begins with Tom visiting the town "darn" (he doesn't like to say "dam") while on a field trip with his adult school class. Sean Hayes from Will and Grace does a hilarious turn as a tour guide.

It turns out the dam is also home to Bass Fest (that's "bass" as in the musical instrument, not the fish). I'm actually a bass player myself, so I have to admit all the bass references cracked me up, especially when bass player Wizzard (Bob Odenkirk) announces on TV that he'll be playing a G three octaves lower than anyone has ever played. Tom tries to protest the festival, however, when he discovers that the low frequencies could rupture the dam. He takes his position in his "protest canoe" above the dam, and begs Wizzard to stop playing when leaks start appearing and water begins to pour out of the dam. The Mayor insists it's not the bass playing but Tom's "heavy canoe" that's causing the dam to give.

Everything up to that point was pretty funny, but when Tom gets the brilliant idea to have Wizzard play a riff that Tom himself would then "doo wop" back to him through a megaphone, somehow creating equal sound forces on both sides of the dam in order to maintain the structure, I completely lost it. It's that slow, dry, methodical approach coupled with moments of complete absurdity that make this one of my favorite shows on the air right now. In an interview with Pop Candy's Whitney Matheson, co-creator Tim Heidecker stated his hopes for the show, saying, "I think we'd like it to be kind of a special show for people. If you were looking back, you'd say, 'Remember that show? That was a great show. And it was special to me.'"

I don't think Heidecker is too far off. The show couldn't fit anywhere else but on Adult Swim, and yet, it almost doesn't belong there, either. It's too easy to say that the people who don't like it (and a lot of people don't) just don't get it, but that's a rather weak retort when you consider it could be used to defend pretty much anything: You don't like filling your shoes with mayonnaise? That's because you don't get it, man!

No, it's something else. The show is, for all intents and purposes, a critique of small town business practices and poor civic planning, but its humor is spawned from some weird dimension that only Tim and Eric seem to have access to. It's also extremely dry, and while I have no data to back this up, I wonder if a lot of its fans fall into my "late twenties and older" age bracket, rather than it being attractive to younger viewers more in tune with the grotesque weirdness of shows like Aqua Teen and similar fare (and I say that as an Aqua Teen fan). Not everyone's cup of tea? Yeah, I'll agree with that. Completely dismissible? Well, that I would argue. I think there is something brilliant at work here, but if majority rules and the show fades away, I'll at least be able to say that yes, Tim and Eric, Tom Goes to the Mayor was special to me.

Oh yeah, and thanks to Joel for hepping me to that interview.