Schitt’s Creek – TV review

20th June 2020 · Film, Books, TV

Like many others, my lockdown has been joyfully soundtracked (should that be teletracked?) by Schitt’s Creek.

There’s something so perfect about a show divided into snackable 20-minute segments, demanding no real commitment, that you can pick up and put down whenever you like, safe in the knowledge that you will never lose the plot or forget who’s who like Line of Duty.

It’s laugh-out-loud funny, its mockery is never cruel, and it boasts the gentlest character arc and most laudable message of all time.

The plotline is perfectly simple: a rich, snobby, dysfunctional family fall on hard times and are forced to live in a cheap motel in a one-horse town full of simple country folk they despise.

In time they find that the simple country way of life – basically being nice, kind and generous not only to one another but also to them, despite their disdainful awfulness – rubs off on them, cures them of their mean-spirited ways, and ** SPOILER ALERT ** makes them better people.

Last night I finished the 80th and final episode of its six seasons and I now feel as if the Roses (Johnny and Moira, David and Alexis) and the Schitts (Roland and Jocelyn) and Stevie and Twyla, Patrick and Ted, and Bob and Ronnie, and even Mutt who mysteriously disappeared quite early on and was never referred to again, are my friends.

Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose is one of the great creations of all time: a vain, self-important prima donna of a faded soap actress with an endless array of different designer outfits and outrageous wigs (“my girls!”), who deludedly believes her next starring role is just around the corner, .

And her spoiled children: David, with his equally (if not more) deranged designer creations and misplaced hauteur, and his sister Alexis, with her own wardrobe of designer frocks and endless stream of anecdotes about romances with every global celebrity from Prince Harry to Harry Styles (which ended because England was, “like, too rainy”) and a Thai drug lord named Aroon.

I don’t know how I will live without them.