The Joyous Sublime of "Schitt's Creek"
The Canadian sitcom offers a pleasure a little more profound than escapism
I was a latecomer to Schitt’s Creek, the Canadian sitcom that has, slowly but surely, become a true cultural phenomenon. Though I was, of course, familiar with the many (many) memes the show has generated, for some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to watch it. “I don’t need to see yet another fish-out-of-water-show,” I thought sneeringly to myself.
Well, then it swept the Emmys in 2020, and I began to think that maybe I really was missing out on something. “What the hell,” I thought, “I’ll give it a crack and see what happens.” The first season was very enjoyable, and I soon found myself swept into this whimsical world with its pretentious but lovable protagonists, the Rose family, and the bizarre but equally lovable residents of the fictional town of Schitt’s Creek. With each subsequent season, I found myself falling more and more in love with each and every character, from the bumbling but earnest patriarch Johnny Rose (played by the truly genius Eugene Levy) to the sarcastic but emotionally rich Stevie (played by Emily Hampshire).
From the beginning, it was clear that there was something special about this show, some bit of sitcom magic that comes along only once in a great while. And, with each subsequent season that sense grew ever stronger, particularly with the introduction of Patrick Brewer, who became the business partner and later love interest (and, eventually, husband), of the show’s resident queer character, David Rose. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the romance between these two characters became the emotional centerpiece of the show, and some have even gone so far as to say that they are the most joyful thing on television. It’s not hard to see why: there’s an undeniable chemistry between Dan Levy and Noah Reid, one that impacts every scene in which they appear together. Watching them, you can well believe that they’re a couple that has found love where they least expected it. Though they do have their ups and downs--including Patrick’s revelation that was once engaged to a woman--they persevere. Most refreshing, perhaps, is their absolute emotional transparency with one another, best exemplified by Patrick’s heartfelt remark that “you make me feel right, David.”
Many people have noted that Schitt’s Creek is wholesome escapism, creating a world that we yearn to escape into, one full of bucolic charm, small town humor, and characters that we want to spend time with. There’s something to that argument, particularly for queer viewers. It’s been observed, for example, that part of the show’s appeal for queer folks is that it depicts a world in which homophobia doesn’t exist, so that Patrick and David can explore their relationship without the fear of violence and rejection that is so often a part of queer television narratives.
And it’s definitely true that there’s a fundamental optimism to the show that’s sharply at odds with the cynical age in which we live. Yes, the Roses are incredibly spoiled (at first) and prone to looking down on the town and its residents, but the show never really asks us to to hold them in contempt (a common approach in shows of this type), despite the fact that they seem so hapless when as they attempt to adjust to life outside of their wealthy bubble. It’s clear from the beginning that, beneath the dysfunction and the distance among them that their money has created that they love one another; a crucial part of their character development revolves around their gradual realization of just how much they care. The irony is that they only really grasp this in the very final episode, when they are each going to go their separate ways: Johnny and Moira to LA (where he will reign over his new hotel empire and she’ll resume her acting career), Alexis to New York City where she will become a publicist, and David will stay in Schitt’s Creek running his store with Patrick.
Indeed, the fact that each of the Roses ultimately discovers their own talents is one of the show’s great strengths. It’s common in sitcoms of this type to paint the wealthy as inept at, well, anything and everything; it’s the source of much of the humor. With each season of Schitt’s Creek, however, we come to realize, and to appreciate, just how skilled they are at their chosen professions. Moira, for all of her ridiculousness and melodramatics, is actually a good actress; she would have to be, in order to make something like The Crows Have Eyes 3: The Crowening into something more than just a piece of shlock. Johnny is adept as a businessman. After all, their initial fall from grace isn’t due to his mismanagement (or even to the decline of the video store market) but is instead the result of his business partner’s embezzlement. David, for all of his snark and hysteria, is onto something with his idea of a small-town store selling boutique items (after all, Beekman 1802, anyone?) Even Alexis, arguably the most dilettante-ish of the family, shows herself to be remarkably adept at being a publicist, helping to shepherd her mother’s resurgent film career and planning a surprisingly successful single’s week. Even cynical Stevie, who becomes a sort of adopted member of the family, not only discovers that she’s a good actress (with her star turn in the local production of Cabaret) but also has skills as a junior partner in Johnny’s growing hotel empire.
Thus, I think there’s something more profound going on with this series than just escapism, and the term I would propose is “joyous sublime.” The sublime, as most people know, is notoriously hard to describe with any specificity, but in its most general sense it can be described as a phenomenon that is so intense, so vast, so beyond the ability of mere words to capture, that it takes you out of your own subjectivity. What I think I’m trying to get at, or define, or explain, in a term like the “joyous sublime,” then, is that sensation that you get when you watch a show that so fully and completely invites you into its world that you feel as if you’re literally losing yourself there. It is, I think, a close cousin of the sort of utopian entertainment phenomenon described by Richard Dyer, in that like utopia, the joyous sublime offers us the solutions to the shortcomings of the real world. But whereas Dyer’s utopia is intrinsically connected to capitalism and its shortcomings—which movies, as products of that system, promise to resolve—the joyous sublime is something simpler and yet also more profound, something that simply is.
For a devout anti-cynic like me, there’s something profoundly appealing about the joyous sublime. It shatters the idea, so common in our discourse and in our everyday life, that everyone is out for themselves, that everyone--whether they’re a politician or your neighbor or your Trump-loving uncle--has an agenda, and usually that agenda is diametrically opposed to the things that you value and love. It would have been easy, for example, for Schitt’s Creek to show Moira as a cynical and apathetic member of town council but, instead, she shows herself surprisingly consistent and thoughtful (in contrast to Roland, the town’s bumbling and irritating mayor).
A show like Schitt’s Creek allows us to fully lose ourselves in the midst of a world of good feelings, without every sliding into cheap sentiment or somber melancholy. One of the series’ greatest strengths as a sitcom is that it manages to find that balance between deep feeling and delightful humor, often within a few seconds. For example, after Patrick makes his heartfelt plea for David to forgive him for not telling him about his fiancee, David responds: “That's the most beautiful thing that anyone has ever said to me aside from the Downton Christmas special!” Of course, he goes on to describe why this betrayal is so difficult for him to move past, but it’s the blending of the hilarious and the deeply moving that makes this scene, and so many others, work. There are few other sitcoms that pull this off as adeptly as Schitt’s Creek (The Golden Girls is one of them).
Even those moments that are sad, such as the breakup of Ted and Alexis in the middle of season six, still have something beautiful about them. Their split isn’t acrimonious or bitter; it’s simply the recognition that their lives are moving in opposite directions; they both realize that if they tried to make their relationship work they would only end up resenting the sacrifices they were both forced to make. Despite the fact that we’ve been cheering for this couple ever since Alexis realized that she’d been a fool to cancel their engagement (twice), the show allows us to simply feel this moment, to immerse ourselves in the complicated emotions that it evokes. Like the characters, we recognize that even moments of heartbreak can contain a pearl of joy at their center:
See, that’s precisely what makes Schitt’s Creek so joyously sublime. No matter what happens, when we watch this show, we’re in a world that we want to inhabit, sharing these moments with characters that we often wish were our friends. We desperately want these characters, strange and frustrating and gloriously ditzy as they can sometimes be, to succeed, because the show has so consistently asked us to not just watch them but to feel with them. We feel with David as he watches Patrick serenade him with Tina Turner’s song “Simply the Best,” Dan Levy’s face capturing—beautifully, exquisitely—the act of falling in love. We feel with Johnny as he yearns for a simple Christmas with his family. We feel with Stevie as she tries to figure out what to do with her life. And we feel bereft when, at last, we must say goodbye.
Of course, the flip side of the joyous sublime is that it can be jarring to return to our regular lives, our humdrum subjectivities, our bleaker, more cynical world. However, we can take comfort that Schitt’s Creek, like so many of our other sitcoms, is always there, just ready for a rewatch. The opportunity to lose ourselves again is always there: we just have to seize it.