Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tim Dillon: This Is Your Country’ On Netflix, Where The Comedian Springers Into Action As A Would-Be Daytime Talk Show Ringmaster

Tim Dillon’s brand of comedy made his podcast hugely popular during the pandemic, raising his profile and hsi tax bracket, and landing him his first Netflix special two years ago ( Tim Dillon: A Real Hero ). The streaming giant couldn’t quite capture in an hourlong stand-up set what makes Dillon tick. Perhaps this homage to the scandalous daytime talk shows of the 19990s and 2000s will do the trick?

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The Gist: Earlier this year, Netflix made an ambitious bet on John Mulaney by allowing the stand-up comedian to host and preside over a multi-night series of live talk shows that evoked nostalgia for the freewheeling nature those talkers seemed to carry in the 1970s, mixed with the unpredictability of live TV.

Now comes Tim Dillon with a talk show of a different flavor, very much in the vein of the daytime talkers of the 1990s and 2000s, from Maury to Montel, but squarely landing within the aesthetic of the late Jerry Springer, who died last year but not before presiding over a tabloid brand of talk that emphasized sensationalist confrontation over philosophical debate, making the genre look more like a circus or pro wrestling than a talk show. Dillon’s take on it isn’t much of a rebrand. He’s just stamping his particular personality onto a format we all remember.

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What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Again, this is not so much a comedy special as an homage or an effort to resurrect The Jerry Springer Show .

Memorable Jokes: As such, the tropes all feel familiar, if perhaps with a few updates, such as the guy who apparently lost $200,000 on NFTs but wants to assure his pregnant partner that if he just dumps even more of their money into crypto “shitcoins,” they’ll be back in business.

They trot out a man in a dog costume, calling him Bandit, in a perverse attempt ot convince a man’s dad to stay in America rather than returning to Central America.

Afterward, in passing, Dillon says “It’d be hilarious if you remove the dog head and it was RFK,” and then impersonating the latest Kennedy to run for president, adds: “I’m going to dress up like a dog on Netflix because I want to be the president of the United States.”

Our Take: In real life, Dillon performed at shows raising money and stature for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s would-be presidential campaign earlier this year. And yet, nothing Dillon did here could even remotely compare to the currently ongoing scandals coming out about RFK Jr. just in the past week or two, from his dalliance with a political reporter to more recent revelations suggesting he cheated on his famous wife, Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, with multiple other women. In fact, Dillon taped this special a week before RFK Jr. even announced he was suspending his campaign to support Donald Trump instead.

All that aside, though, what are we even doing here? What is Dillon hoping to accomplish here?

Does he actually want to be our new Springer, hoping Netflix gives him the opportunity to host a talk show on the regular? Or is this just a one-off satirizing the form? Is this a sketch show in disguise? Does any of that even matter?

Because as is, it feels so ephemeral as television that you could just have it on in the background while doing chores and not pay much attention to. Which, in a more high-minded pursuit, could be one way to parody America, by suggesting this is what’s happening in our country and we’re not paying enough attention to it in the first place.

As comedy highlighting a comedian, however, this feels more like Matt Rife’s crowd-work special , falling prey to the same problems that effort did by focusing our attention more on the random audience members who grabbed the spotlight away from the star comedian we clicked over to see.

Dillon is the kind of guy who’ll make fun of you for losing your money on crypto and NFTs, while also taking your money to make fun of you about it and sell it in Miami. But where is Dillon in all of these 47 minutes? He’s more of a bystander than a ringmaster. This could be so much more of a commentary on ugly Americans, if only Dillon put as much of himself into this project as he does his regular podcasts. Here, he’s taking the Netflix cash without putting his mouth where his money is. So to speak.

That he titles it Your Country and not Our Country also serves as a reminder that Dillon would much rather be the outsider barking at us at how idiotic we are, than be one of us actually looking in the mirror with us at ourselves and perhaps solving any of the problems. He remains nihilistic at his core. At least the core he lets us see.

If only he’d let us see it onscreen.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Netflix cannot seem to figure out how to show the world what it is about Tim Dillon that makes him worth paying attention to, but it almost seems as though they care as little about that as he does. As long as they’re getting the viewing metrics for comedians, the quality of the comedy or the satisfaction of the audience somehow seems secondary to them.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First .

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