Netflix ‘Tires’ Season 3 Review - The Tire Shop Has Become the Least Dysfunctional Thing

After the unexpected success of their marketing efforts in Season 2, cousins Will and Shane are now co-owners of the West Chester, Pennsylvania branch of the Valley Forge Automotive Center. The returning ensemble is joined by a substantial group of new recurring faces, including Billy Magnussen, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Taylor Misiak, Sofia Hasmik, Dan Soder and Bobby Lee. There is something deeply satisfying about a comedy finally figuring out what it wants to be. Tires was funny from the beginning. But Season 1 sometimes felt like Shane Gillis had wandered onto a sitcom set, looked around and thought, "Yeah, we can probably get some jokes out of this." Season 2 was where the show started feeling like an actual television series. Season 3 is where it finally feels comfortable. And that makes a surprisingly big difference.

The basic ingredients haven't changed. Will is still the perpetually stressed, spectacularly unqualified heir trying to keep his family's automotive business alive. Shane is still his cousin, employee and personal tormentor, possessing the remarkable ability to make every workplace problem approximately 400 percent worse. Cal, Kilah and Dave are still there. The shop is still a disaster. Everyone is still making decisions that would get most employees fired within a week. And yet the characters now feel like people rather than comedy delivery systems. That's the biggest improvement.

Steve Gerben continues to be the show's unlikely secret weapon. Will could easily have become unbearable—a permanently anxious rich kid whose problems exist mainly because he keeps creating them—but Gerben has gradually turned him into something much more sympathetic. Will genuinely wants to succeed. He genuinely wants to be respected. And he genuinely has no idea how to accomplish either. That combination is comedy gold.

Shane Gillis, meanwhile, has settled completely into Shane. There's no longer any sense that Gillis is trying to "act" in the traditional sitcom sense. The character works precisely because his deadpan indifference and casually destructive behaviour feel like a natural extension of Gillis's comedic persona. But Season 3 also gives Shane something the earlier seasons increasingly hinted at: actual emotional stakes. He's still an asshole. Just a slightly more three-dimensional asshole.

The season's central idea is growth—both professional and personal. Will and Shane now have more responsibility, but having responsibility doesn't magically make either man responsible. Their attempts to build a better future repeatedly collide with old habits, old relationships, and the deeply unfortunate fact that neither cousin is particularly good at communicating. The show gets a lot of mileage out of that contradiction. These men have somehow been handed more authority without being given any additional wisdom. Imagine giving two raccoons the keys to a tire franchise. That's basically Season 3. The new cast additions are also a smart move.

Billy Magnussen's Taylor brings a different energy into Will's orbit, while Taylor Misiak's Jill and Sofia Hasmik's Lucy open up new dimensions to Shane's personal life. Dan Soder, Bobby Lee and the other newcomers similarly expand the show's comic ecosystem without making the original ensemble feel disposable. And that's important because Tires has always been at its best when it feels like an ensemble rather than simply "the Shane Gillis show." The chemistry between the regulars remains excellent.

Chris O'Connor's Cal continues to be one of the show's most dependable sources of absurdity, while Kilah Fox has increasingly become someone the series can trust with material beyond simply reacting to the guys' nonsense. Stavros Halkias remains perfectly cast as Dave, whose particular brand of workplace incompetence somehow continues to produce fresh jokes. The show has also become much better at allowing characters to exist outside the immediate joke. That's where Season 3 feels most mature. Not mature in the conventional sense.

Tires has no interest in becoming a tasteful workplace dramedy where everyone learns a valuable lesson over coffee. There are still plenty of crude jokes, insults, uncomfortable conversations, and moments where you find yourself thinking, "There is absolutely no way HR is going to handle this correctly." That's the show's identity. Trying to sanitise it would destroy half the fun. What has changed is the ratio between joke and character. Season 1 sometimes felt as though the characters existed to set up the next Shane bit. Season 3 increasingly feels as though the jokes emerge because these particular idiots would naturally behave this way. That's a subtle distinction. It's also the reason the show is funnier.

The workplace itself remains the show's greatest comic device. The Valley Forge shop is a beautifully mundane setting, and the series understands that you don't need increasingly ridiculous premises when the characters are already ridiculous enough. A sales problem can become hilarious. A personal disagreement can become hilarious. Someone simply saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment can become hilarious. The comedy comes from accumulation. One bad decision. Then another. Then Shane. Always Shane.

The formula can occasionally become predictable, particularly if you've watched enough Tires to recognise the rhythm of a typical episode: Will has an idea, someone objects, Shane makes things worse, everyone gets distracted, and somehow the original problem becomes a completely different problem by the end. There are also moments where the improvisational quality that makes the show so appealing can work against it. Some scenes feel deliberately loose rather than tightly constructed, and not every joke lands with the same force. But the misses are increasingly easy to forgive because the ensemble has become so enjoyable. And, importantly, the show knows when to let a scene breathe.

Some of the season's best moments aren't punchlines at all. The uncomfortable silence after someone says something unbelievably stupid. The look one character gives another when everyone in the room knows exactly what just happened. That is sitcom chemistry. The biggest compliment I can give Season 3 is that it no longer feels like a Netflix comedy built around a famous stand-up comedian. It feels like a comedy series that happens to have Shane Gillis at its centre.

The show has gone from being a collection of funny people making funny noises in an auto shop to something with an actual ensemble identity. But now there's something underneath all of that. Heart. Not enough heart to ruin it. Just enough to make you care when these idiots inevitably screw everything up. And they will. They absolutely will. Tires Season 3 is the show's most confident and fully realised season yet. Steve Gerben and Shane Gillis remain the central attraction, but the increasingly strong ensemble—including Chris O'Connor, Kilah Fox and Stavros Halkias—makes the series feel much bigger than its premise. The expanded cast brings fresh comic dynamics, while the writing gives Will and Shane enough personal history and emotional consequence to make the increasingly ridiculous situations land harder. The humour remains crude and unapologetically juvenile, and the show's loose improvisational style occasionally produces a dud, but the characters now feel sufficiently lived-in that even the quieter moments are funny. A show about a bunch of idiots fixing tires shouldn't have this much character development. And yet here we are.

Final Score- [7.5/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times