Netflix dropped all twelve episodes of “Tires” Season 3 at three in the morning on 13 August and then let the algorithm do the work. There was no campaign worth the name, no billboard, no press tour, just a struggling auto shop in West Chester, Pennsylvania quietly becoming one of the funniest things on the service. That is a strange thing to say about a series that started life as a self-funded pilot on a comedian’s YouTube channel and drew politely middling reviews for its first six episodes. Somewhere between then and now, “Tires” grew a spine, and Season 3 is the season where it uses it.
The setup has not moved. Will (Steve Gerben) manages the West Chester branch of Valley Forge Automotive Center, his cousin Shane (Shane Gillis) works there mostly to make Will’s day worse, and the numbers never quite add up. What is different this time is the pressure, and the length. Twelve episodes is a lot of runway for a show that used to run six, and the writers spend it on consequences rather than bits. Phil (Thomas Haden Church), Shane’s father and Will’s uncle, spends the first half of the season squeezing the shop for margin and treating his own managers like suspects, and by the end he has handed the whole thing over and walked out the door. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Tires” Season 3 and its finale, including the FBI raid at Valley Forge and Lucy’s pregnancy.
Somewhere between then and now, “Tires” grew a spine, and Season 3 is the season where it uses it.”
Season 3 opens on “It Often Rhymes” with profits sliding again and Phil ordering Will to fire an underperformer named Mike Weir. Will goes to do it, discovers the man is liked by everybody in the building and going through something ugly at home, and quietly reassigns him instead. That single decision is the whole season in miniature. Will keeps choosing people over numbers and Phil keeps filing it as weakness, and the show is honest enough to admit both readings are defensible. The same episode plants the other fuse: Shane spots his high school girlfriend Jill (Taylor Misiak) on a dating app, single, and you can watch him decide something before he has thought about it. Nothing in the premiere looks like a season arc. All of it is.
Phil’s paranoia takes over in “Secret Shopper”, which sends an undercover customer around the whole chain to catch managers lying to head office. It lands about as well as you would expect in a business where everyone already assumes they are being watched, and the ruse falls apart in Will’s shop specifically. What matters is the thing the episode leaves in the background: Kilah (Kilah Fox) notices an unfamiliar vehicle parked near the garage and gets waved off. Nobody follows it up. Remember it. “Women’s Business” then hands Will his most uncomfortable half hour of the year, dragging him to a women’s networking event as Kilah’s plus one, where the room quietly decides he must be gay and he is far too polite to correct anybody. Shane, meanwhile, talks Cal (Chris O’Connor) into skipping inventory for a night out, which is the last genuinely consequence free thing either of them does all season.
By the fourth episode the show has stopped being about a tire shop. “What’s That Like” has Will scrambling to repair a reputation he never really had, while Shane joins a gym, gets ambushed by influencers filming him mid-set, and ends the episode in a hospital bed with a panic attack nobody can explain to him. Gillis plays the hospital scene without a single joke landing, which is not a thing this show used to allow. The gag is that everyone around him treats it as an inconvenience. The point is that he is thirty something, out of shape, working at his father’s business, and his body has just sent him a message he cannot read.
“Wings” is where Season 3 turns, and it turns hard. Shane watches an older man die at a bar, and the aftermath is played straighter than anything in the first two seasons combined. He is not grieving a stranger. He is doing arithmetic on his own life, out loud, badly. Later the same night he meets Lucy (Sofia Hasmik), a bartender who is quicker than he is and has no interest in pretending otherwise, and the show finds a register it has never had. The B story is just as good and much crueller: Will runs into Taylor, a former coworker who left, took a swing and got rich, and spends the rest of the season chewing on a startup offer he turned down years ago.
Episode six, “The Locked Room”, is the business plot’s low point and the season’s structural hinge. Phil strips Will and Shane of their partner status and sends them off to chase a fleet contract with a bagel company, which is exactly the level of humiliation he intends it to be. Lucy suggests seeing Shane again despite the two of them agreeing on almost nothing, and he says yes for reasons he does not examine. And Pete, a tire rep with a salesman’s instinct for a soft target, starts working on Dave (Stavros Halkias) with an offer that is obviously not free. Three separate traps, all set in one half hour, none of them sprung.
Bonnie’s tarot reading gives “Six of Swords” its title and its shape. Will, of all people, tries to patch up Phil and Bonnie (Rachel Blanchard) because a functioning Phil is a Phil who leaves him alone, and the episode is funnier than that description suggests. Shane and Lucy argue about whether either of them wants children, which reads at the time as a compatibility question and reads on rewatch as the entire season telling you what it is about. He goes to Jill instead. The writers do not soften it. He is not torn between two people. He picks the easier one and tells himself it is the honest choice.
Then comes “Volley”, the best episode of the season and it is not close. Shane and Jill’s date collapses into a police pursuit and ends with her falling into a pit, which is the funniest sustained sequence the show has ever built. Dave attends a work dinner that relocates to a strip club and gets photographed doing it. And Kilah goes to a reunion and finally confronts the volleyball teammates who froze her out years ago, in a scene Fox plays with enough control that the room goes quiet around her. Three tones in twenty two minutes, and the show holds all three. If anybody still thinks “Tires” is only a hangout comedy for guys who like podcasts, that is the episode to hand them.
Will’s own humiliation arrives in “Dog’s Out of the Fence” while Shane is busy juggling two relationships badly. Pete produces the photographs and starts leaning on Dave for the deal he wanted all along. Will lines up a meeting with Taylor about the job he thinks is waiting, and while he is out chasing it he is replaced as manager by a guy called Joe. Gerben has always been the show’s straight man and its most uncomfortable presence, and this is the sharpest use anybody has found for him: a man who is not failing dramatically, just steadily, in a town where everybody already knows him and has already decided what he is.
Everything turns in “Tigers at the Circus”. Taylor’s offer, it emerges, was never a partnership. He was shopping for marketing services and Will heard what he wanted to hear, which is a more brutal joke than any punchline in the episode. Jill finds out about Lucy and ends it inside a scene. And the tire plot resolves in the dumbest and most satisfying way available: TakaTaka, a Korean company trying to break into the American market, needs a partner, and the test drive meant to sell them goes catastrophically wrong when Shane nearly kills everyone in the car. The tires come off it without a mark. Will turns that into an exclusive deal with TakaTaka absorbing the lease, which is the first genuinely competent piece of business anyone at Valley Forge has done in three seasons.
Dave finally cracks in “Let’s Just See”, and the confession goes somewhere a sitcom usually will not. He tells Barb about the strip club and the blackmail, and she answers with an affair of her own, and instead of a blowup the two of them land on an open marriage. It is staged for laughs and it is not entirely a joke. Halkias has quietly become the most capable actor on this show and almost nobody will say so out loud because of what the rest of the material asks him to do. Elsewhere Shane drinks something of Bonnie’s he should not have and spends the back half of the episode somewhere else entirely, and Phil, watching Will run the TakaTaka deal properly, hands the whole operation to the two of them and announces he is going to see the world.
Which brings us to “It’s a Good Day, West Chester”, a finale that spends its first act pretending to be a victory lap. Will and Shane go on a local morning show to announce the new chapter. Two representatives from a rival chain called Coastal Tire turn up at the office with an offer for the stores, which is the last thing two men who have owned a business for one day need to think about. And then Shane’s phone throws Lucy’s texts onto the studio monitors, live, and the viewing area of West Chester learns she is pregnant a few seconds before he does. The FBI raid lands in the same stretch, Cal is taken in over his brother Thatch and the white nationalists Thatch runs with, and Frank, the friendly new face Cal has been drinking with all season, turns out to have been an informant the whole time. That vehicle Kilah clocked in episode two was exactly what she thought it was, and eleven episodes of nobody listening to her pay off in about ninety seconds.
What keeps the finale from collapsing into a pile of cliffhangers is the last ten minutes. Shane goes to Lucy. He does not run, he does not make a speech, he sits down and tells her he wants to be there, and she decides to keep the baby and starts texting him about names. Then Will pulls the exact prank on him that opened the series premiere, and the show closes a loop it has been running since 2024. Frank, in the most “Tires” gag of the year, gets rehired. Critics caught up with the show this season: ScreenRant scored it 9 out of 10 and called it the best yet, and RogerEbert.com argued the series has developed into one of Netflix’s best comedies. Both are right, and both slightly undersell what actually changed, which is that “Tires” finally started letting consequences stick to the people who earned them.
What Do You Think? Is Shane actually capable of being somebody’s father, or is Season 4 setting up a year of him failing at it in ways that will not be funny? Should Will and Shane take Coastal Tire’s money and walk away from a business that has never once been solvent? And after three seasons of Cal being the harmless one, does the arrest change how you read every scene he has ever been in?
See you on the next binge!
