If Heaven Had a Creek: Schitt's Creek and the Zeitgeist and Me and Probably You Too (Patreon)

So here’s the thing about Schitt’s Creek.

I love it. I really do. I have come around and I have all the feels about all the characters (except Roland) and have gotten so deep in the weeds with it that I won a trivia contest by being able to pull how much money Twyla won in the lottery directly out of my ass. While dressed head to toe as Moira Rose. I am all in on Schitt’s Creek. I understand the instinct we all have to beg and coax and bargain with our friends to watch it. I have literally already bought my son’s David Rose Halloween costume.

But y’all are doing it wrong.

And by y’all I mean basically everyone, including the cast and the tribute documentary and the Emmy Awards and your very own Rosebud Motel obsessed BFF.

I resisted this show for a long time. Because people kept trying to get me into it by saying all the same stuff I still hear people say when they’re trying to sell a newbie on this really very lovely show.

It’s like Parks & Rec, same vibe, you’ll love it!

So positive and kind and sweet and affirming!

It’s the most perfect sitcom of the century, maybe ever, nothing else is this deep and moving and funny and flawless.

I watch it over and over and over again and I cry every time, it’s perfection, you basically hate art if you don’t like it!

And then, inevitably, somebody sits down to watch it, ready to be wrapped up in the warm fuzzy sweater of a kind and perfect show and goes…

What the fuck I fucking hate these people.

Like I said, I love this show. But the crowning of it as a perfect cinnamon roll saint of comedy and emotion and love and family irritates the shit out of me. One of my favorite shows is The Good Place and I’ll be the first to tell you the third and fourth season have serious flaws in terms of pacing and especially the whole Brent/John/Simone plotline. Happy to acknowledge the first season of Parks & Rec sucks miniature horse balls. Ted Lasso, and you know how I feel about Ted Lasso, plays a little fast and easy with how quickly everyone is won over by the Magical White American and if I’m honest I’m a little unsure about how the second season is starting out.

It’s fine to love the absolute guts out of a show without acting like it’s without flaw and nothing like it has ever aired before or will again, for the Risen God of Good Writing and Queer Positivity descended from heaven to give us this, their only begotten child.

The first season of Schitt’s Creek is rough, and that’s a generous assessment. I have talked to so damn many people who just kind of gave up somewhere through season two because the whiplash between the show people described and the show they were actually watching unfold was just bizarrely incomprehensible. And then they all say the exact same thing I said when I was stuck part way through season two, pretty repulsed and not remotely picking up what the citizens of Schitt’s Creek were putting down.

“I only like David, everyone else is awful.”

You can’t call a show perfect when the first two seasons are a slog to get through. That’s about twenty-six hours before a whole lot of people start to enjoy it. It’s a big ask. And unlike Parks & Rec, you can’t really just skip it either, because you won’t understand the whole premise of the show, or have any investment in the characters by the time the writing figures out what kind of show it wants to be. It’s not fully episodic, for all we call it a sitcom. There are developing plotlines and arcs over multiple episodes that make it tough to just jump in wherever.

Weirdly enough, I think Schitt’s Creek does some of its best work and best advertising in gifs, where the pure charisma of all the actors is distilled to the ultimate concentrated form.

I talked a little in the Ted Lasso essay about how Schitt’s Creek is a fantastic lens through which to view the slow shift in comedy trends of the last decade. And part of the very issue I’m talking about is precisely that, and precisely when it aired. It started in 2015 and ended in 2020, and by Moira Rose’s favorite wig, the world changed a fucking lot in that time frame. It probably felt like something of an organic change if you were watching it live. I highly doubt asking everyone to sympathize with and love and comfort and witness an obscenely rich family losing their wealth and sneering at the people in the small town they move to, a town that, no matter how “low” the Rose family has fallen, they still fucking own, felt quite as repulsive and tone-deaf as it does if you turn it on for a binge in 2020. When I first tried to watch it at the beginning of the pandemic, it felt like watching that grotesque video of celebrities singing Imagine in their mansion gardens. I don’t fucking care about these people and I don’t sympathize with them losing wealth I and my friends will never see, I hate them and every time one of them references how great being rich is, like that alone is somehow a joke, I want to punch them in the eye.

And here I do want to point out that on a second watch, the early seasons are much, much more bearable, because I do already love these characters, so there is pleasure in seeing how far they’ve come. But when there’s no way to know how hard this show is going to shift in season three, it just isn’t any fun. A whole lot of us actually did lose everything in 2020, and we didn’t own a town to fall back on. It hits different. but fortunately or unfortunately that’s the new reality. Most people, in the long run, will watch a show on streaming, stripped of its temporo-cultural context. So you just get hit in the face with all this wherever and whenever you are, rather than when it was written, and a lot of it just felt gross in 2020 in a way it didn’t necessarily in 2015.

In the previous comedy era, the kindness and community and warmth of Parks & Rec was an anomaly. The late 00s and early 10s were absolutely ruled by a new kind of sitcom, full of cruelty and cringe humor. Laughter at the expense of major, and even lead characters. Gone were the Friends, now we live in The Office. And even Parks & Rec is pretty brutal to Jerry and even Tom and Andy and sometimes Leslie herself. Community, for all its glory, absolutely shits down the neck of anyone not in the core group, and, you know, Pierce exists. The first two seasons of Schitt’s Creek are very much in this vein. We are meant to cringe at the Roses’ out of touch aristocrat idiocy, and also cringe at the bumbling hayseeds of the town itself, and Roland is as disgusting as he will ever be, and he will never not be disgusting. There’s no one to root for. Are we supposed to hope they get their ostentatious riches back or look forward to them faceplanting in their own privilege when confronted with basic life tasks? It’s fairly unclear for way too long. The first season is just look at these assholes over here, look at these idiots over there. And I could feel my stomach clench in preparation for yet another piece of media in which poor exist in order to teach rich people a lesson about not being completely garbage, to better them and lift them up and teach them the true meaning of Christmas, in which normal fucking humans are mere props in the oh-so-important hero’s journey of the wealthy toward self-actualization.

Only the sheer overpowering charisma and facial acrobatics of Dan Levy and the grounded, Daria-like presence of Emily Hampshire keep the thing afloat, and it feels like it’s going to tip over into that virtuous-poor-NPCs-quicken-the-dead-hearts-of-the-rich narrative any second.

Welcome to Everybody Loves David, co-starring Stevie.

The problem is, if you’re cringing at everyone, there’s nowhere to find an anchor point for your heart, and it just kind of feels like being strapped to a chair and being forced to watch Scott’s Tots over and over Clockwork Orange style.

It’s almost like Flanderization in reverse. The characters start out as the most shallow, repetitive, catchphrase-y, cliche, un-alive versions of themselves, and end as achingly real, fleshed-out, vivid people full of flaws and quirks and interesting choices.

But man, it is a road to get there, and pretending it isn’t just makes people feel bad when they bounce off it and everyone else seems to riding on a cool bus they just can’t find a seat on.

I was sold on Ted Lasso 6 minutes and 9 seconds into the first episode.

I finally began to like Schitt’s Creek in the fourth episode of the third season. and I didn’t love it until season three episode twelve.

I honestly don’t think Schitt’s Creek is the Schitt’s Creek people are talking about when they talk about Schitt’s Creek until Patrick turns up.

And Patrick is truly great. The final piece of the puzzle. A character we are never meant to cringe at, finally, someone good and kind and normal who looks at the Roses, and particularly David, with love and sees the best in them, without trying to change them or confront them or, probably most importantly, doesn’t bend over backwards to avoid calling them out to spare their feelings with that rictus grin of embarrassment everyone else in town just spent three seasons plastering to their faces. But he doesnt’ do it cruelly, either. When David doesn’t understand some deeply basic shit, Patrick just points it out and either takes care of it or calmly expects David to step up. His presence grounds the show and anchors it, creates a relationship for people to root for, provides a straight man other than poor put-upon Stevie to contrast the antics of the town and family, and finally, finally, gives us those moments of radical, arresting sincerity that made this show what it became.

It’s no accident that Patrick’s arrival coincides with David, at long last, deciding to do something with his life and abilities beyond whinging about how uncool everyone else is compared to him. Not that the whinging isn’t funny, it absolutely is, and without it, I think the show probably would never have sold a pilot. But he is saved in the nick of time from becoming a one-note joke machine, and Patrick makes him feel like a whole and complete person, one who is actually learning and growing and trying. And the relationship, along with Alexis’s evolution, gives the show something to be about other than a tired poor little rich family human zoo.

And everything just starts to click.

But despite the center stage that David and his indestructible charisma always commands, in many ways it’s Alexis who steals the show in terms of character development and subverting expectations. She starts out an absolute walking trope of a spoiled rich girl, throwing out name-drops and referencing her Paris Hilton (but somehow maybe also an international spy/criminal?) former life. but long before David starts getting his high-end shit together, it’s Alexis who first takes baby steps toward actualization, finding a way to let go of the conviction that her world will be restored, and function in her life as it is. She recognizes what basic things her parents’ benign neglect and her privilege lacked, goes back to high school, applies to college, starts a PR company, and explores herself as a single woman without making that all about finding a new man, and does it all before David so much as learns to say I love you to another human being.

Alexis is the best. And it’s her moment in S3 E4, talking David down from his anxiety before a driver’s test, that made me commit to seeing the show through. Its also, without spoiling anything, her arc that most strongly defies the genre expectations of the sitcom/family dramedy, her happy ending that does not align with cultural narratives about love, work, partnerships, money, fulfillment, and women.

The most quietly striking example of Alexis and who she allows herself to become is her episode with Klair and Albany, not because it’s a fairly predictable learning moment where her old life is dangled before her and she finally sees how shallow and mean and empty it was, but because she never tells anyone Klair was even in town. No one else knows what happened or what she did or said or how she felt about it. She doesn’t turn the experience into an anecdote about how great she is now, as David and Moira and probably even Johnny would have eventually. It happens to her, she reacts with new understanding, and the experience remains her own. And none of this happens because the poor of Schitt’s Creek teach her their ways. They mostly don’t even take her seriously until very late in the game. She grows, on her own, and it’s fantastic.

On my first watch, I came to love everyone and enjoy their growing up and becoming more than their tropes, but Moira Rose still frustrated me. She seemed never to change or evolve, still mostly putting down everyone and clinging to a hope of their old life returning while the others tried to forge ahead. when Johny defends Schitt’s Creek, she tries to shush him. When Alexis tries to create something real with her singles’ night idea, Moira tries to screw her over as she seemingly always has. (Also, how does she still have all those designer clothes if the IRS took everything? Boo.)

But then, of course, there’s the Cabaret episode, and I’ll just say it’s one of my favorite episodes of any show, and yes, goddamn it, I cry every time. And on a second watch through I wasn’t waiting for her to become a totally different person the way Alexis did, so I could appreciate her more, and come to love her unshakable faith in herself and her genuine love for her husband and at least one of her kids at a time.

One of the most-lauded aspects of SC is the total lack of homophobia, even in rural Canada (and I must insist on my headcanon that Letterkenny and Schitt’s Creek take place in the same Rural Canada Cinematic Universe, only bolstered by Gail the Bartender’s appearance at Alexis’s singles’ mixer). And it is refreshing, it is nice and not stressful, it’s enormously good and relieving to see a queer couple where no one dies or turns evil or loses things they love because of who they are. Especially a pansexual character, as we are vanishingly rare onscreen. The episode where we meet Patrick’s parents fucking kills me.

So many queer stories are about what loving who you love costs us, rather than what it gains us.

And even if every other thing about Schitt’s Creek was shit, and it isn’t, that alone would be enough to give it a place of honor next to the handful of other above-the-fold media properties that step outside that particular box. Straight couples get mountains of rom-coms that, while not exactly emotionally healthy, still affirm and celebrate the status of their love as central to the human narrative.

It’s nice as hell to get one of those in our column.

That said, when watching the documentary about the show, I do feel they pat themselves on the back a little too hard about that and some other aspects of the work. Maybe it’s the historian in me, I bristle whenever anyone says anything is the first of its kind or has never been done before or is totally unprecedented. Nine and a half times out of ten, it just isn’t. Human history is long, and often boring, and there almost always is precedent one way or another.

No one ever said shit about Willow and Tara either, and that was in the 90s. Star Trek: Discovery, in fact, did it first, since it premiered with a loving gay couple no one ever remarked upon as unusual in 2017, and Patrick didn’t peek up out of his paperwork until 2018. And if one wishes to point out that those are speculative fiction and do involve unfortunate Bury Your Gays tropes, well. Not to make a big deal of it, but a BUNCH of the insistence that Schitt’s Creek is sui generis and totally unique in its approach to character, comedy, kindness, and representation is serious Michael Shur erasure, who gave us Captain Raymond Holt and his wonderful husband Kevin in 2013, along with bi/pan Rosa later on, and homophobia in the police force, while very present in the real world, is treated in 99 as a relic of the dark old days. The Good Place does kind of wimp out on this one, as Eleanor is canonically bi, but never acts on it onscreen (offscreen is implied). Nor does homophobia seem to be much of a feature in Pawnee, Indiana, whereas Real Indiana gave us Mike Pence. David and Keith faced far less discrimination in Six Feet Under than they would have in real life in 2001, and theirs is the truest and steadiest love through all the seasons. Hell, people have constant beef with Omar in The Wire, but none of it seems to be because he’s gay. Modern Family has a big gay wedding for two of its core characters.

And that’s not even getting into literature, where this has been done many times and wonderfully.

There are other shows where homophobia is elided or not a factor. There are other queer couples who are healthy and loving and whose relationship or marriage forms a major emotional arc of the show. Do many of them have flaws and problems? Yeah, definitely. And Patrick is probably a little too perfect a boyfriend, who never has serious conflict with David. He’s even an amazing MC. Patrick is the dream! And it’s just slightly too easy. Do I care? Nope. Is it true? Yep. (And did I spend the whole time wishing Stevie would find a nice girl and run off into the flannel together? Double yep.)

Schitt’s Creek didn’t invent the wheel, you know? They just made a really fucking beautiful wheel. Nothing is taken away by acknowledging that all art stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before, even problematic giants. Nothing is lost if SC is not burning down the sitcom system and replacing it with something entirely new. It is part of a new trend, ahead of the pack, even, but it is not Adam, the First Man.

I just want people to talk about the show for what it actually is: flawed and fabulous and fascinating. It probably did not actually deserve to be the only show in history to win all those awards at once. (And not for nothing, but how overwhelmingly white the cast is probably helped with a notoriously white voting pool.) But it deserved some of them! It’s not all or nothing! A show can be great without erasing the whole history of 21st century television.

LOOK I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW THEIR HISTORY OK.

As a closing note, I do want to say one very praiseful thing. Sometimes, in some queer positive shows that center MLM relationships, there can be a tendency to sneer at the women around, whether they’re gay or straight or in between or cis or trans. Sneer, or use as props or treat as obstacles or otherwise not invest them with the same crunchy character drama and humanity. Probably as a reaction to the absolute burning weirdolaser-focus of heteronormative stories on the relations between men and women.

We won't even get into how bad straight media is about this.

Ask me to throw out an example and I’m gonna say Will & Grace, in which Grace's lameness was constantly the butt of everyone’s jokes, the rare lesbians were objects of derision and walking, barely talking stereotypes, and Karen was only allowed to be funny if she was also hateful and alone (her husband is spoken of but not part of the original show that I recall, can’t speak for the reboot). It's just a continuation of the usual misogynist narrative, an unfortunately magnified by some stories that remove women as a love interest, whereupon some writers suddenly find they have no use or interest in them as people at all.

Schitt’s Creek never does that. It never sneers at the women in the story, not even Moira Rose, who in other hands could have been a pretty upsetting Norma Desmond portrait of pathetic older women. It’s really, really nice that a good story for men doesn’t have to come at the expense of good stories for women for once, and pretty much everyone is given dignity and a moment to shine and a place to stand. The endrun of Schitt’s Creek is probably its best episodes, and that’s not how the arc of quality usually goes. Everyone gets their aresteia, a Greek term for a singular moment of self-expression and thought transformed into action.

I’m still not totally sure how I feel about their wealth returning like a deus ex machina, it does feel a little like “you were good boys and girls so now you can have your toys back” and that’s very much balanced by David and Alexis’s choices…and very much not by Johnny and Moira Rose’s. I could easily see them ending up not too far from who they used to be in ten years if their success continues and their kids only visit on holidays. But it’s also not a bad note to end on, nothing past Patrick Ex Machina is bad in Schitt’s Creek. It just gives me pause when I think over the show as a whole and where we’ve gotten in a culture that’s finally starting to talk about income inequality in anything like a serious way. It does feel like money being granted form heaven as a reward for personal growth, and that rings a little hollow to me.

Ew, David.

But in the end, I do love it. The Cabaret episode. The Jazzagals. A Little Bit Alexis. The look on Johnny and Moira’s faces when they realize their son has created a genuinely good business. The proposal hike. The clothes. The wigs. The songs. It’s all the feels. All the time. I will watch Dan Levy in anything and everything forever, and probably the rest of the cast, too. And what a solid he did for his father and Catherine O’Hara, who finally got a vehicle where they could be the stars they are and not just someone’s mom or dad on the sidelines. Levy is a treasure, and that’s why no matter how hard people bounce off the first two seasons, they always add: but I love David.

I put it on for comfort now. I really do. Now, after all the work I had to do to get through to the gooey center of gentle, loving, evolving humanity.

I recommend it. Whole-heartedly. (Except Roland, who is terrible from start to finish and I will never ever like.)

I just recommend watching it as I eventually had to in order to get to the good part: first two seasons on in the background while you clean or craft or work or do other things, until you start sitting down longer and longer, and finally don’t want to get up at all.