“Our lives are like little baby crows carried upon a curious wind and all we can wish, for our families, for those we love, is that that wind would eventually place us on solid ground.” – Moira Rose
I started watching Schitt’s Creek during my last game jam weekend. I decided to try it out mostly because I remembered it getting a lot of buzz for its last season back in 2020 and getting a lot of Emmy Awards for that season. I ended up binge-watching all six seasons of the series in around two weeks.
The accolades are quite well-deserved, as it’s a very good sitcom. The series follows the rich and famous Rose family who lose their fortune to an embezzling business manager. They are left with one asset: a small, backwoods town they once purchased as a joke: the titular Schitt’s Creek. They end up having to stay at a run-down motel in Schitt’s Creek and having to find their way forward in the world after losing everything.
The series starts off with the predictable fish-out-of-water scenarios one would expect, with the Roses initially experiencing friction with the residents of their new home town. Through the course of the series, they eventually learn to adapt to their situation and to get along with the small-town residents.
I think the best thing about the series is that it’s very positive; there is very little malice, drama or conflict among the main cast, and most of their comedic situations are due to things like miscommunications, poor expectations, or plain bad luck. One of their major long-running story arcs is about David, the son of the family David, who is pansexual, meeting and falling in love with another guy and eventually marrying him, and this story arc is executed over four seasons without a hint of homophobia from the other characters (there is a minor plot point where the guy is worried about how his parents will take his coming out, but they face no issues there.) They don’t even really use the “shit” pun in the town name in more than one episode!
It’s one of those shows that’s more absurd situation than absurd comedy. It’s not the ridiculous, laugh-out-loud, greatly memeable kind of show like some of my favorites like Brooklyn Nine Nine or Parks and Recreation and focuses more on the absurd situations the Rose family find themselves in. It’s relatively short (each of the six seasons I have only around 13 episodes) and the run was ended by their choice (and not by a network cancellation or such), so they were able to wrap up most of their story arcs and give each of the characters satisfying endings. (Except maybe Ted. Poor Ted!)
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