What is it? A Canadian sitcom with talent to die for.
Why you’ll love it: Before his retirement last year, David Letterman welcomed Chris Elliott to his talkshow. Elliott was a feature player in Letterman’s glory years; a man who, thanks to his Letterman appearances and his absurdist sitcom Get A Life, went some way to defining the pervading humour of the 1990s. Reminiscing about their beginnings and careers, Elliott said to Letterman: “Look at you. You’re a television icon, adored by billions. And I’m on the Pop network with a show called Schitt’s Creek.” With a defeated shrug, he added: “So we both achieved our dreams.”
Clearly, your expectations for Schitt’s Creek won’t be high. It is a series you have never heard of, it relies on a miserable vortex of crude wordplay for its title and, truth be told, you have probably watched plenty of funnier shows this year. But it does offer capital-P performances. Eugene Levy (who created the show with his co-star son, Dan) plays a suddenly poor millionaire forced to live in an Ontario backwater he once bought as a joke. There, he frequently runs up against Elliott, playing the town’s mayor with all the mannerisms of a picked scab.
The secret weapon, though, is Catherine O’Hara, who plays Levy’s wife. With a dead-eyed commitment not seen since her turn in Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration, O’Hara gives the role everything she has got. She is a true – and truly hilarious – monster, smashing through every scene in a whirlwind of wigs, yelps and boggle-eyed reaction shots. Entire scenes are carried on the back of her effort alone; in many, you can practically hear her grunt.
In its home country (where it recently won nine Canadian screen awards), Schitt’s Creek is about to start its third series. British viewers, meanwhile, have only the first run to go on. Happily, these episodes feel complete in and of themselves. The premise – a family of gormless millionaires stripped of everything they own and flung out into the middle of nowhere – is dealt with in a matter of minutes and, from that point, it is a long, hard scrabble for them to escape Schitt’s Creek.
Every episode reveals a little more about the familial hierarchy, which becomes more and more realistically complex as the series goes on. This means that Eugene Levy, famously a world-champion straight man, gives himself two bites of the apple. Around his family, he plays the baffled patriarch, a figure of earned wealth trying to talk sense to figures of inherited wealth. But, out in the real world, he is as cluelessly confounded as anyone else. And, to anyone who knows him purely as the dad from the American Pie movies, he is a revelation. Even though this is ultimately a series about desperation, he routinely cuts a figure that borders on suave.
The first series ends on a note of begrudging acceptance – one that follows a set piece that will be familiar to fans of I’m Alan Partridge. Hopefully, Netflix will provide more episodes soon. A cast like this deserves to be watched.
Where: Netflix.
Length: Thirteen 20-minute episodes.
Standout episode: Episode three, when reality sets in for O’Hara and she starts to have a meltdown.
If you liked Schitt’s Creek, watch: Arrested Development (Netflix), Mascots (Netflix), Red Oaks (Amazon).
