Tires is Netflix’s No. 1 show in the US after its 12-part season 3 drop last week, a turn that would have sounded unlikely when the comedy arrived in 2024 with six short episodes and a 38% critic score. The third season has now pushed the show from a shaky start to the top of the platform’s US chart this week.
That surge is why viewers are searching for Tires Season 4 now: the series has moved from being written off to being watched at scale, and the latest season landed with a 96% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. For Shane Gillis, who took a major financial risk on the original concept and had already released Live in Austin in 2022, the payoff is not just that the show survived. It is that it became Netflix’s biggest current comedy conversation in the US.
The path to that result was unusually long. Netflix did not pick up Tires until after Gillis and Steve Gerben had already finished the self-financed first season, which put the series in a rare category where it could be judged, adjusted and expanded after debut rather than abandoned on first reaction. Season 2 grew to twelve episodes, and season 3 matched that length, giving the show enough room to settle into a rhythm that the first six-episode run could not fully establish.
That first run drew the kind of criticism that usually ends a series before it gets going. Decider said there was room for Tires to grow into a decent workplace comedy, but not much of that growth would happen during a six-episode first season. Yet the later episodes found a broader audience, helped by a stronger ensemble feel and by season 3 additions such as Vince Vaughn, Andrew Shultz and Thomas Haden Church. The result is a show that was once treated as a proof of concept and is now being discussed as one of Netflix’s biggest US hits.
What comes next is still the open question. A 2026 Emmy nomination is the only forward marker in view, and the real test is whether Netflix keeps backing the series long enough for that audience goodwill to harden into awards attention. For now, Tires has already answered the harder question: a self-financed comedy that started small can still become a chart leader if the platform, the cast and the audience all arrive at the same time.
