Hi, I'm very smart and rate this series 10 stars mostly just to try and make up for the couple dimwits who gave this lovely work a low rating. I genuinely think Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories is probably the best work this duo has produced. Don't get me wrong, Awesome Show Great Job is a timeless piece of art with lots of laughs and brought to life so many unique characters and great, unironically iconic bits. Casey Tatum, the singing boy, the Cinco family, etc., but I just feel that Tim and Eric really hit this specific target with such grace when it came to the slippery seriousness of Bedtime Stories. When T+E took a step back from Awesome Show's usual approach of chasing every laugh and setting a consistently bizarre scene, they really found a tasteful stride that surprisingly effectively surpassed the surrealism of Awesome Show.
I think the differing natures of Awesome Show and Bedtime Stories could be effectively compared to the fluctuations of the Uncanny Valley. Awesome Show intentionally leans more towards what could be considered the artificial life or anti-realism side of the valley. This side of the curve has a steeper slope that falls into T+E's signature surrealist humor. Given a steeper slope, there is less horizontal space to move in order to dive into that surreal state, same as it is to hop out and resurface to the "cartoonish" side of the valley. This steep dive, however, gives the show little area to dance along the lines of cartoony and uncanny, so you'll typically end up with either a very cartoony sketch or a very surreal sketch.
Bedtime Stories, on the other hand, leans on the opposite side of the curve. On this side, the top of the valley is where you'll find realism and the more natural seeming dramatics featured in this show. With an ever so slightly wider cliff side to play on, Bedtime Stories is capable of slinking at whatever desired speed down into a comedic yet increasingly disturbing scene of surreal styled horror. There are moments where Bedtime Stories delves so far into its surrealist state that it comes out the other side of the valley, returning to the cartoony and lightheartedness that is familiar to Awesome Show. Awesome Show similarly had moments where they would take the surrealism so far that the humor verged into horror.
What Bedtime Stories does is fill the audience with dread just to trip them with twist of amusement and finally shove them to the ground with even more dread, only to proceed to bash them over the head with more stupid laughs, and so on and so forth.
You take a normal world, with normal characters with normal emotions and normal reactions in a normal setting, and you unleash the disturbed minds of Heidecker and Wareheimer onto this world who make it something truly awful yet amusing to a point that it is just so incredibly enthralling.
Never has a comedy made me want to cry. Good job!
