Steve Gerben, the man who built a Netflix hit from the life he’d spent trying to escape

Steve Gerben

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	June 24, 1983 Berwyn, Pennsylvania
Occupation	Actor, Writer, and Producer

There are two ways to describe what Steve Gerben does for a living. One is accurate: he co-created, co-writes, executive produces, and stars in Tires, a Netflix sitcom that hit number five on the platform’s Global Top 10 the week its third season dropped, and was renewed for a fourth season before the month was out. The other is also accurate: he plays a guy who can’t quite control his own shop, can’t quite manage his cousin, and can’t quite get ahead of the situation he was born into — and the reason he can play that so convincingly is that for much of his adult life, that was the situation.

Gerben grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania — Delaware County, locally called Delco, a working-class suburb west of Philadelphia where family businesses and blue-collar self-reliance are the furniture of daily life. His grandfather ran a construction equipment company; his father ran an auto-body shop. The Gerben family knew about small-business ownership the way some families know about law or medicine: from the inside, with all the stress that implies.

He enrolled at George Washington University and left. Then enrolled at Delaware County Community College and didn’t finish. What followed was a series of jobs that were adjacent to a normal life without quite being it: postal carrier in Berwyn, paralegal at the office of his trademark attorney brother, a return to the auto-shop. Stand-up comedy was what he wanted — he has cited Christopher Titus as a formative influence — but the path from wanting it to making a living at it is long, and Gerben’s didn’t straighten when he moved to New York. He describes the stand-up years as something that “never took off.” The phrase, delivered without self-pity, turns out to be the premise of his most successful work.

The partnership with Shane Gillis and director John McKeever began on the Philadelphia comedy circuit. Gillis was building the following that would eventually make him one of the most-talked-about figures in American comedy; McKeever was the logistical and directorial engine. Together they produced Delco Proper, a regional web series written by Gillis and directed by McKeever, which gave Gerben his first screen credit. He appeared across 12 episodes of Gilly and Keeves, a sketch comedy series, then co-wrote Gilly and Keeves: The Special in 2023.

Tires crystallized everything that had been building. The premise — Will Jacobs manages a Valley Forge Automotive Center location, his family’s struggling auto-repair chain in West Chester, Pennsylvania, while his cousin Shane makes the job difficult at every turn — was semi-autobiographical in the specific way that comedy works best: not confessional, but precise. A pilot appeared on YouTube in 2019, was picked up by Quibi before that platform collapsed, and eventually found its way to Netflix. Season 1 launched in May 2024 with six episodes. Critics were divided. Rotten Tomatoes logged 58%.

Season 2 expanded to 12 episodes and landed better. Season 3, which premiered August 13, 2026, was the moment the show’s reputation caught up with its quality: RogerEbert.com called it “one of Netflix’s best comedies.” The audience agreed. The show debuted at number five on the Global Top 10 the week of August 17. Season 4 was greenlit within days, with Thomas Haden Church — who joined as a series regular in Season 3 — confirmed to return.

The unresolved question around Tires is what happens when a show’s anchoring character isn’t quite its most prominent star. Shane Gillis, by the time Season 3 aired, had become a significant cultural figure in his own right — through stand-up specials, through the still-debated circumstances of his departure from Saturday Night Live in 2019, through a Netflix deal that includes two new stand-up specials alongside the show. The critical attention and the cultural conversation have followed Gillis. Gerben, who plays the character trying to maintain authority in a situation that systematically resists it, has been called the show’s structural straight man rather than its engine. That framing undersells what he does. Tires doesn’t work without someone to carry the weight of exhausted competence — the specific comedy of trying professionally in a place where no one respects your authority. Gerben performs that without melodrama, which is considerably harder than it looks.

In 2025, Gerben appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, a measure of the mainstream traction Tires had started to generate. His podcast presence — across Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, Flagrant, and Are You Garbage? — has built him a following that treats the comedy podcast circuit as the real barometer of a comedian’s standing.

He has spoken publicly about living with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune condition that affects his hands and wrists. COVID-19 worsened the condition in 2021 and temporarily rendered his medication ineffective. He mentions it the way he mentions everything about his trajectory: factually, without complaint, as one of the things that is true about being him.

Tires Season 4 is in development. The question the show now faces — whether a hyper-specific comedy about the Philadelphia suburbs can expand its audience without losing the specificity that makes it work — is the same one Gerben has been answering since a YouTube pilot became a Quibi pilot became a Netflix series that now ships four seasons. So far, going narrower has been the right call.

Tags: actors, Shane Gillis, stand-up comedians, Steve Gerben, Tires, John McKeever