With ‘The Machine’ on our minds, here are the best Jimmy Tatro movies and TV shows

With the release of Bert Kreischer’s The Machine comes a renewed, fiery public cry for more information on Jimmy Tatro. America’s got Tatro on the brain. Tatro fever. They look at Jimmy Tatro and say “I want more of that-ro.” Or something – intro paragraphs aren’t always easy.

The long and short of it is, if you watched Jimmy Tatro in The Machine and wondered what else he’s done, here’s a selection of some of the actor and internet comedian’s best work.

American Vandal

At first blush, Netflix doesn’t necessarily track as the natural fit for a wildly snotty satirical crime mockumentary. They have, after all, historically gone out to lunch on genuine, laughless true crime series for years now. Remember Tiger King? Making a Murderer? It’d be weird to see the streaming service start biting the hand that feeds it. 

But that’s exactly what they did with 2017’s American Vandal, a bitingly bratty sendup of the genre that presents the mass spray painting of images of swimsuit areas as being at least as important as anything Serial ever covered. Tatro plays the primary suspect in season one, perfectly channeling every teenager who’s ever been positive that they were about to get away with something. 

22 Jump Street

If you, like so many others, have ever looked at Jimmy Tatro’s face and thought “he looks like he would have thrown a carton of milk at me and then laughed in college,” then you’ve got something in common with the casting director for 22 Jump Street. The achingly self-aware sequel to the already meta reboot sees Tatro playing Rooster, the sort of guy who sees a Channing Tatum cop character and decides to be best friends with him. It’s bro-heavy, stereotypical jock casting at its finest.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Stop us if you’ve heard about this already, but 2020 was sort of a bummer year for movie studios. Nobody can quite remember why anymore, but for some reason, people mostly avoided being in enclosed spaces with large groups of strangers for a year or so, robbing many of the opportunity to see, for example, Wonder Woman 1984. Which is too bad, since it also meant that The Wolf of Snow Hollow flew under the radar for most people, making back just a little over 10% of its already low $2 million budget.

It’s a weird little piece of horror comedy cinema, written and directed by The Beta Test helmer Jim Cummings, following a series of apparent werewolf attacks in a small town. Tatro’s PJ gets to see the carnage up close in the opening act of the film and turns in a fun performance throughout.

Theater Camp

Tatro is rapidly carving out a niche for himself as The Guy Who Plays Clueless Tech Bros, digging into the relatively fresh trope in Home Economics before polishing it in 2023’s Theater Camp. Another mockumentary, this one has roots in the “let’s save the (x)” genre, with a group of scrappy believers banding together to save the eponymous theater camp. With an 85% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie — currently streaming on Hulu — is a barbed but loving look at the ins and outs of drama kid culture, and all the cringe that comes with it. Additional points for the fact that Patti Harrison, the MSG of comedy and who recently posted Tatiana Maslany’s head on a stick, is a part of the proceedings.

Home Economics

Home Economics boasts a premise that would seem heavy-handed and predictable if it was the setup to a joke that your dad misremembered: There are these three siblings, right? One’s rich, one’s middle-class, one’s poor.

Once it gets through the inevitable growing pains that almost all sitcoms suffer from in their debut season, the show finds itself in its unpredictable mix of saccharine sweetness and borderline-nihilistic chaos. A stacked cast of old comedy pros that includes Topher Grace, Sasheer Zamata, and Caitlin McGee is rounded out pretty perfectly by Jimmy Tatro, playing the nigh-infinitely wealthy and equally-nigh-infinitely naive tech genius brother. It’s a painful portrayal of the weirdness of financial disparities in families, and if you’ve ever had to explain to a family member why they shouldn’t buy your 8-year-old an SUV for their birthday, then, you know. Good for you. Must be nice. Also, you’ll dig this show.