Trivia / Tom Goes to the Mayor

• The Danza: Michael Ian Black as Dr. Ian Black.
• Dawson Casting: An inverted example: Tim Heidecker was still in his 20's while portraying Tom, who's in his mid-30's.
• Follow the Leader: While [adult swim] shows weren't exactly normal, Tom Goes To the Mayor truly pushed the boundaries of ironic anti-humor at that time and, more importantly, had significant doses of live-action in it. A lot of productions on Adult Swim that premiered after it seemed to keep taking the same darkly comedic, bitingly ironic approach to humor to more and more logical extremes and were also done in live-action, rather than animation: Saul of the Mole Men, Fat Guy Stuck in Internet, and even later additions like Loiter Squad. It's not altogether far-fetched to see Tom Goes To the Mayor as a major early symptom of Adult Swim's Network Decay: for context only a few months after the show was cancelled came the infamous publicity stunt for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which many have pointed to as the moment Adult Swim began a long and almost fatal decline.
• Hostility on the Set: According to their DVD commentary for the episode "Wrestling", guest star Gary Busey was by far the worst they had worked with at that time. Gary kept getting angry at Tim for some reason, to the point where Eric had to pretend to fire him in front of Gary just to get the recording finished (and he didn't even do all the lines he was supposed to). They've gone as far as to claim that when he dies, they'll release unseen footage of him being an asshole backstage. It's pretty telling that his character, a high-strung wrestling coach, has a stroke not even two minutes into the episode and spends the rest of his screentime hooked up to an oxygen tank.
• Playing Against Type: A retroactive example; in later Tim & Eric productions, Tim Heidecker would generally portray the more corrupt halves of the duo's characters while Eric Warheim's characters would be more moral, if only by comparison. Here, Tim plays the Only Sane Man and put-upon Nice Guy Tom while Eric plays the sociopathic and megalomaniacal Mayor.
• What Could Have Been: According to the 2002 pilot, Tom's last name was originally Bradley instead of Peters