Tim's Blog: 8 More Years!

Can you believe it? 8 years of Office Hours. It all began when our friend Mark Zuckerberg launched a new feature on Facebook: Facebook Live. I'm sure there were other ways to broadcast over the internet back in 2016 but Facebook Live was so easy and instantly connected me to my built in audience right there on Facebook. I couldn't resist. I thought it was a clever way to promote my album In Glendale, which I'd just released and needed some explaining. I was hooked right away. I adapted my twitter persona, vacillating between honest sincerity and overblown indignity and anger, or sometimes finding voices and characters to create sketches live on the air. With a cobbled together collection of audio gear, I labored for the first few intermittent months (years?) trying to build my own live morning talk show. A podcast company took interest, and sent over a nice young man named Aristotle to help me engineer things, but we never did get a handle on the tech side of it. Eventually Vic, who had just moved to LA and Doug started dropping by and adding thoughts and laughs and drops... First individually, and then together they quickly bonded over their sound effects and shared sense of humor... and the trinity was born.

We patched together a semi regular run of shows those first four years - we started bringing in friends as guests, Fred, Natalie Merring, John C would call in to talk about his Acai bowls... I'd shut things down a few times, while I went off to work on bigger projects, only to get the bug for live radio again and start things back up.

We had also developed a loose community of listeners out there - the initial trolls and MAGA creeps got bored of pranking us and some regulars started to stick around (Phil!) I had already built a few cult comedy communities with Eric and On Cinema and now it seemed like I was building another one (albeit, with some serious overlap)

By the end of 2019 I was feeling energized and excited about Office Hours and felt like it had potential to grow, but I just couldn't deal with the technical side of it anymore, and I wanted help. I had lunch with my dear old pal Matt Carlin, who I knew had a love for good radio and liked the show and asked him to come on board to help sort things out. He was eager and excited for the challenge. He didn't have much experience but I knew him to be a smart cookie who I could trust.

The plan was: We'd relaunch Office Hours as soon as I got back from Tim and Eric's Mandatory Tour in early 2020 with a Patreon to help fund our expansion into a new studio in my garage and start paying me Doug and Vic for our time and hard work. Little did we know that when I got back from the road, Office Hours would be nearly the ONLY thing we'd be able to do for the foreseeable future!

The relaunch which was presented as an 8 hour marathon from Doug's house is an incredible time capsule of a significant moment in world history! It's the dawn of the pandemic and we're all discovering what it means in real time, live on the internet. Phil had flown in from Atlanta, and described a "harrowing journey, where people were wearing masks and gloves...")

And so Office Hours would become our pod - Doug, Vic, Matt and I would have our weekly show to focus on and gather in my garage each week. What a blessing it was to have THAT on the schedule when everything else around us was disintegrating. Wes and then Luke came on to build us a working studio where we'd finally say goodby to the beeps and bops... Matt started booking guests and the show started to find it's groove as a reliably fun show for people.

The community grew and we got to know our audience more and more. My friendship with Matt Vic and Doug grew exponentially and I suddenly was meeting all these wonderful guests Matt had booked. The show would also end up strengthening my friendships with other people I'd get on the show, like Fred, or John Early, Claudia... We'd bond in real time over the show and that would lead to off the air hangs... The drops became engrained in our language, like emoji's and our hot takes, personal preferences, likes and dislikes became part of our identities - for better of worse you all got to know us pretty well!

The world started to open up and I got busy with real Hollywood and other parts of my creative life yet we still managed to keep things together and put on a regular show pretty much every week. In 8 years outside of Office Hours I managed to put together and release 4 LPs of music. Eric and I made Beef House and toured Australia and The US and squeezed in numerous commercial gigs. John C, Fred and I wrote and produced Moonbase 8, On Cinema cranked out 2 seasons of Decker for TV, 8 or so Seasons of On Cinema, 8 Oscar Specials, a televised Trial, a MOVIE and launched the Hei Network when Adult Swim pulled the plug. Acting became a bigger part of my life: Scoring a role in Us, a trip to Italy for the ensemble comedy Spin Me Round , 2 seasons on Killing It,   guest spots on I Think You Should Leave, Our Flag Means Death, and recently What We Do In The Shadows.  More acting jobs dotted my calendar and if you want a full accounting of my work since 2016, please visit my imdb page! I put The Very Good Band together and toured the states twice with a tour of Europe in between. Even the leather jacket guy got to make a comedy special.

Yep, through all of that running around and traveling and getting up early to get into hair and makeup Matt kept the ship running, Vic and Doug kept innovating and writing bits and games... we made 2 very special Drop Concert movies - we used Office Hours for experimental satires of the things we love to hate, like the Joe Rogan spoof with Rajat and Jeremy and the parody of Club Random with Fred and Jay... Matt's great taste in music led us to invite some of the most cutting edge working artists in to play music and my exposure to a whole new world of great music blew my brain wide open. And getting to do this blog every Saturday has also enriched my life, honing my writing skills, which I think is leading to something big and exciting (hint, hint)

2024's been a hectic year of acting work, and Doug's Eric Andre tours, but we'll keep rolling - I'm heading to New York for another movie on Monday and we may have a few clunky weeks, but rest assured, we'll keep chugging along. I can't say how much we all appreciate all of you who've stuck with us and made this community something special. I hope you all find this world of ours a safe port in a dark and stormy sea of shit.

Let's do 8 more years and reassess, OK?

Love you all! T

PS - feel free to share what Office Hours means to you, or just your favorite moments?