You’ve heard it all before: “the first Season was great, but then . . .”
Schitt’s Creekthe end of the season, of which only won a whopping 15 Emmy nominations, broke this trend, as did many others: the truth is that it has improved with age. What began as a silly, sometimes mean comedy became a creative masterpiece and a cultural icon — and he did it by embracing the things too much modern comedy is not.
Ask any Schitt’s Creek fan on the beginning of the fair for the first time, and you’ll probably get the same warning from all of us: stick it out through the first season, it gets better. In the beginning, the show seemed to struggle with a couple of things: in particular, its tone and unlikeable characters. It felt like a Arrested Development knock-off, full of unlikeable rich characters get taken down several pegs. Cringe comedy — both of the Rose family suffering, the humiliation after the unworthiness and of the crassness of villagers as Roland Schitt — pervades much of the early episodes, and it is difficult to distinguish the spectacle of dozens of other “let’s laugh at people terrible” comedies of the same era.
But even in those frustrating episodes, the seeds of what he would do Schitt’s Creek a phenomenon that they were there. Roses are not the averagethey are fools, and that helps a lot. There are signs that their unpleasant traits of Moira’s outrageous delusions of grandeur, David espinosa, a self-involvement, Alexis searches surface — are the result of something painful, the concealment of the nuclei more soft under your (well-dressed) exterior.
“Beneath the wigs and the single-line and the running gag is the great, hot heart of a show that allows us to live in a world where kindness and compassion will win.”
By the second season, however, the sample seems to settle slowly in the tone that became a success. The Roses ‘ hard edges softened a little and his heart slowly began to open. The dialog was still as strong as always but the humor was more about the absurdity of delightful character moments (all together now: “fold in the cheese!“). It happened in small moments as Alexis asking David for a hug or Moira being humiliated by the Jazzagals talent, but it all led up to the pivot point: the season two finale.
In this episode, Johnny and Moira run into a couple of his old life and we ended up having dinner with old friends, in addition to Roland and Jocelyn. His old friends are in as much as we were when we met for the first time, which is why it is so cheer-worthy when the Roses defend his new friends and his new residence. The episode ends with the Roses and the Schitt join their children in a barn party, where they dance under strings of lights and say, “I love you” in a loud voice. It is the time in which Schitt’s Creek to find the heat to compensate for the strong-strong comedy, and it is the time of the show as we know it was born.
In season three, you could say that the show was taking the time to let his characters breathe and grow naturally, and was one of the decisions that remains afloat and provides endless fodder for the talented team. If you want to know what really elevated Schitt’s Creekyou can look at the two main plots of the season: Johnny and Stevie taking the motel, and Patrick get to David’s new love interest. The motel story breathed new life into Stevie’s plot, gave Johnny a real purpose after more than two years of uncertainty, and, most important of all, it allowed Stevie to slowly be bent (like the cheese) in the extended family of the Roses.
As for Patrick and David, well, I don’t think anyone expects the Rays of the deadpan, sarcastic colleague that bothered David about your business application would end up sparking one of modern TELEVISION’s most beloved couple. Series creator and star Dan Levy famously said in a 2018 panel that he deliberately Schitt’s Creek a world without homophobia or other hateful ideologies. “I don’t have the patience for homophobia . . . Show us the love and the tolerance. If you put something like that out of the equation, you are saying that there is not and should not exist.” In the place of the usual drama and angst, we come to see a loving gay couple, whose lack of melodrama does not mean a lack of clutter, the awkwardness, or hilarity.
And that, right there, in written form, is the secret of Schitt’s Creek‘s success: its incredible understanding of how to be simply human you can be ridiculously funny and how to have a huge heart that does not mean that you have to be naive and Pollyanna-ish. A lot of contemporary comedy takes a darker tone, laughing at how terrible its characters and situations are, but Schitt’s Creek‘s greatness comes from doing exactly the opposite, and taking the time to let its characters feel like real people rather than joke machines. Underneath the wigs and the single-line and the running gag is the great, hot heart of a show that allows us to live in a world where kindness and compassion win. What is more important, it gives us hope that maybe, with a little work (and some fabulous fashion), we could make our world a little more like the Creek.
