Tim Heidecker Launches His Progressive Take on InfoWars This Week: ‘We’re in a Prove-It Phase’

It’s hard to think of a recent entertainment industry development that generated more goodwill than The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars and instatement of Tim Heidecker as its creative director. On paper, The Onion‘s satirical news bona fides and Heidecker’s commitment to genre-bending alternative comedy make them the perfect pairing to take over the hollowed-out shell of Alex Jones’ disgraced conspiracy brand and rebuild it as a comedy institution for the increasingly weird 21st century.

Then the actual work began.

Heidecker announced the news in an April Instagram post that saw him bust out a gravel-voiced Alex Jones impression, and soon followed it with an 18-minute “emergency” livestream that parodied the ludicrous tropes of the old InfoWars. But the comedy multi-hyphenate always made it clear that he has much bigger dreams for the brand than simply lampooning Jones’ decades-long war against information.

“I think most satire gets old pretty quickly, and we don’t want to keep fueling [Jones],” Heidecker said during his Future of Filmmaking keynote conversation with IndieWire at Cannes. “So the plan is to goof on him for a few months, and have fun with it, and then transition the site into a comedy streaming platform for people that he would hate to see have success.” 

This week, we’ll get to see the first glimpses of that vision. To coincide with the Independence Day holiday, The Onion starts rolling out its first wave of official InfoWars shows on Thursday, July 2.

During a recent conversation with IndieWire, Heidecker stressed that this is a soft launch — everything will still live on The Onion because a standalone InfoWars website and social media channels have yet to be set up, and the programming will still be heavy on parodying Jones and his right-wing media counterparts. But he made it clear that it’s all in service of laying a foundation for a much bigger project.

“We’re launching a couple of shows,” Heidecker said. “One is my extension of my Emergency Broadcast from a month or so ago, sort of a parody of the Alex Jones InfoWars world. And we’re launching The Onion’s Jim Haggerty Show that we’ve been teasing for a while. And that’ll set the tone for the summer. There’s some other little bits and pieces some people were starting to work with, little interstitial short comedy bits.”

It would be all but impossible to start a comedy-focused InfoWars reboot without a good deal of making fun of Alex Jones. But anyone who enjoys Heidecker’s impression shouldn’t get too comfortable. The comedian explained that, after his six Emergency Broadcast episodes drop this summer, he might drop the character altogether.

“I wouldn’t want to become the thing I suddenly become Rich Little who just does Alex Jones as my only form of expression,” he said.

While Heidecker is keeping the door open to revive his Jones impression if the real conspiracy theorist reemerges in public life, his real goal is for InfoWars to eventually stand on its own as an internet-focused comedy brand that erases Jones’ legacy. He and his small team of producers, many of which came from his “On Cinema” and “Office Hours” orbits, are scouring the internet for comedians who are using the language of social media to create new comedy formats.

“I think it’s very much comedians and artists and creators, I guess you’d say, who are using their experience and our experience with the internet as the fuel and inspiration for their comedy. It is very much people that are using the tools of social media, and satirizing that or reflecting that,” Heidecker said. “Parodies of influencer videos or how-to videos, that’s kind of the people that I find the funniest right now, as opposed to, I don’t know what, standup comedy, or more traditional sketch comedy or sitcoms or whatever. It’s that kind of breed right now.”

He continued, “I would say it’s also fairly diverse and progressive, and full of young people who don’t necessarily fall into easy-to-categorize boxes, that work with the current state of the table and streaming right now.”

The plan is to expand InfoWars’ programming over the coming months, primarily starting with short-form videos but eventually pushing into bigger projects that could rival what you see on larger cable networks and streaming services.

“Over the next year, you’ll see smaller pieces and maybe some longer, still relatively short, but some continuing series that would go, try to keep people’s attention span, not worry too much about fitting it into a traditional linear timeline of a TV programming schedule,” he said. “We’re looking to eventually develop longer things that might feel in the Adult Swim 11-minute range. That to us feels long right now. But there’s also going to be just one-offs and minute-long things, three-minute-long things.”

Heidecker is aware that InfoWars can’t yet compete financially with other potential buyers for hot comedy projects, but he stressed that the sky is the limit for future projects. Bigger ideas will be dependent on resources, but he sees no reason why InfoWars couldn’t be a home for longer series or feature-length films in the future.

“I hope, over time, it gets to a point where, if somebody comes in with a half hour that we love, we would want to try to make that happen and beyond,” he said. “There’s all kinds of ways to do it. If you’ve got a movie that feels [like] no one wants to do [it], but it works as something you’d watch on YouTube, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t want to do that.”

Heidecker influenced a generation of comics with his boundary-pushing “Tim and Eric” and “On Cinema” projects, but these days he’s doing something that’s arguably more important: building infrastructure for making comedy outside of traditional channels. His meta streaming service HEI Network is a successful prototype for an artist-owned, fan-supported comedy project. And now with InfoWars, he’s looking to replicate what Adult Swim represented for him: a curation-minded institution where you could count on receiving creative freedom at the beginning of your career.

“The thing that drove Adult Swim in my mind was they were giving autonomy and creative freedom to very individual voices,” he said. “They weren’t trying to fit into any specific format, necessarily. Although they often do, because I think good creatives make stuff that feel like they belong that they’re meant to be watched and you want to ground things in something that people understand.”

He continued, “But, I think the difference is, Adult Swim started very much linearly as a TV channel, and it was something you’d go and watch when it was on, of course. And they’ve since, of course, like everybody else, spread out and are all over the place. They’re also working within the structure of a major media company … and we’re still pretty small, pretty independent. So the buckets of cash aren’t quite as deep as it would be at Adult Swim, even though that was fairly low budget. We’re not exactly super competitive with other major streamers and networks yet, but we’re in sort of a prove-it phase.”

What happens after they prove it? Heidecker explained that the goal is to grow InfoWars into the kind of place where comedians dream of developing their projects, and where audiences can reliably expect to find exciting new talent. Both because the industry needs it, and because of his larger goal: to compensate the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who acquired InfoWars as part of Jones’ defamation settlement and pushed for it to end up in the hands of The Onion instead of a Jones ally.

“I think we’d want to be a viable competitor to other comedy destinations for people,” he said. “I think we’d want to be at the vanguard of where people are discovering new talent, and producing quality stuff, and turning some kind of profit for not only the people that investing in this, but also the path towards paying back, paying the families of the Sandy Hook tragedy, which is kind of at the core of all this.”