Mar 26, 2024

Schitt's Creek: A small town (in Canada, but don't tell anyone), with some gay guys and a boatload of beefcake

In the Canadian sitcom Schitt's Creek (2015-20), video magnate Johnny Rose (SCTV alumnus Eugene Levy) loses his fortune to a shady business manager, and he and his former-actress wife Moira and adult children David and Alexis  are forced to move into a cheap hotel in the desolate small town of Schitt's Creek, where they try to adapt to such hardships as sharing a room and making their own beds.

Link to NSFW version

They butt heads with many curious, eccentric, and passive-aggressive smiling-as-they-dump-on-you residents, like Mutt (Tim Rozon), the mayor's son, who lives in a barn and collects compost.

It reminds me a bit of Gilligan's Island, with the castaways trying to survive on a desert island, their plans to escape constantly falling through at the last moment.



Schitt's Creek is so small that it has only one hotel, restaurant, and "general store," and the same six people do everything.  But still, there's a lot going on, and the Roses throw themselves into town life, getting jobs, joining clubs, running for city council, dating -- a lot of dating.  David (Dan Levy) develops a friends-with-benefits relationship with a girl, Stevie (Emily Hampshire), who appears to be the hotel's only employee, and Alexis has a steady stream of boyfriends, like Mutt and  town veterinarian Ted (Dustin Milligan, left).

That's one of the things I like about Schitt's Creek -- it's overloaded with beefcake, hot guys in tight shirts -- or out of tight shirts -- everywhere you look.



The other thing I like is the writing.  The dialogue is witty, sardonic without being bitter.  There is no us vs. them, normal v. hicks or normal v. snobs.  Everyone has foibles, but almost everyone comes across as likeable.



What I don't like is:





1. David states that he is pansexual, and he is played by Dan Levy, who is gay, yet his relationships are exclusively heterosexual until the third season, when his ex-boyfriend Sebastian (Francois Arnaud) rolls into town.  Later he and Stevie get into a three-way relationship with Jake (Steve Lund, left).  









Eventually his coworker Patrick (Noah Reid) comes out and they begin dating.  Eventually, like in the Season 6 Series Finale, they get married. I get so sick of men who are canonically bisexual but only involved with women, or in this case only involved with women until the showrunners were quite sure that outing David wouldn't cause a mass exodus of horrified homophobic viewers.



2. They go to great lengths to erase everything Canadian from the show.  No loonies, no maple leaves, no jaunts to Toronto.   

Hello, CTV: for those of us who live elsewhere, half the fun of a Canadian sitcom is that it's set in Canada. I want to see multicolored money and Tim Hortons on every corner.  Corner Gas could not take place anywhere but Saskatchewan; Trailer Park Boys could not take place anywhere but Nova Scotia.  Schitt's Creek wants you to believe that it's set in Iowa.




What's wrong with a small town in Manitoba or Ontario?  Especially with all that beefcake going on.

There are some bulges, butts, and at least one Francois dick on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends



1 comment:

  1. Small towns feel more and more like Gilligan's Island.

    Anyway, yeah, this is nothing new. In the old days, Canadian shows would shoot scenes twice to hide the Canadianness of it. So, the Queen is replaced with Andrew Jackson, books in colour are in color, and all metric units are replaced with a system that seems to exist solely to teach kids high-end arithmetic. (Dividing by numbers with three significant figures!)

    It helps that Canadian (and Midwest US) about is more like a boat than a boot, IMO.

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