Shitt$ Creek

This is a Canadian television sitcom with four seasons, two seasons presently available on Netflix. The show receives mixed reviews. I watched both seasons but didn't warm up to characters or the style of its humor until halfway through the first season. They are not sympathetic characters. Then, looking into the show online and seeing the show is created by Eugene Levy and his son, Dan Levy, who plays the dad and the son in the show adds an appreciable dimension. And by then the attractiveness of Annie Murphy playing the daughter comes through and Catherine O'Hara character, the wife, becomes comprehensible. She has a bizarre accent and she's shown in a different wig in each scene. She's nearly impossible to relate to because she's too outré, far too weird, until you comprehend she's playing an actress who honestly doesn't know who she is. The tenderness of the characters is not apparent at first, their vulnerabilities don't show through their arrogance until the show gets going. Once they do emerge then the strength of the characters also come through so that by the end of the second season the viewer is left with the impression these people are not so bad, they're possibly even likable and the humor in each sketch-like scene is fully appreciable as the characters are developed. There are some very funny scenes and although each scene is not a gem there are enough of them to make the show worthwhile.

The plot is a family of video store wealth that loses everything to a criminally corrupted finance officer. Their palatial home is shown only briefly in the first episode to show the wealth that they come from. Their only remaining asset is a town that the father bought the son as joke because of its name. Then they move there and live in a hotel. The humor revolves around them making the transition to material poverty and being forced to interact with small town people. How they react is the charm of this show. The depth of the small town people come through first as jokes about them and then through the breadth of their characters as they fill out. A favorite is an Addams Family analog for the Wednesday character. Another is a young male workman shown with jet black hair and full beard. He has squinted eyes and his beard rounds his face. He resembles a stereotypical lumberjack. Later he shaves his beard while the daughter is sleeping and she wakes up to him kissing her, but beardless. She screams and jumps out of the bed. Then their discussion becomes his resistance to discussing things. She needs him to talk to her more. She says to him, "I need to do less talking and more listening, and you need to do more talking and less listening." That's tenderly insightful for a messed up spoiled rich girl. Her character does this same type of things with all the male characters she interacts with. Her scenes are actually beautiful. Meanwhile the lumberjack worker is shown to have volunteered his public service beyond what was necessary to its court-appointed fulfillment just so he continue working with her as the daughter finished her public service. It's a fantastic insight to his character. And his face is shown to be chiseled model-like facial structure and his blue eyes piercing and no longer squinted. He appears to be a different person entirely during the period his beard is shaved.

The son character is especially intriguing but only slightly more so than the daughter. Eugene Levy as the father plays veritable straight man for the rest. Having seen the whole thing once and having only two seasons available I started watching them over again and now understanding the characters, I must say, some of the scenes have me cracking up laughing. Out loud, belly laughs. The son keeps saying in whispered conversation he doesn't understand what common things mean. For example, His dad will say, "A word to the wise," and the son will say, "What does that mean?" He does this each episode at least once. He is a man, but a boy, who simply does not understand people. Finally, at length, the viewer realizes the character really doesn't know what things mean, that for all their money and connections and rich history they really do have giant gaps in their comprehension. The viewer appreciates the creativity of Dan Levy in creating this character. Imagining what or who Dan Levy had in mind for his character becomes an exercise. It's fascinating.

Check this out these image results:  [Eugene and Dan Levy] When you've seen the show you can easily pick out which photographs come from the show and appreciate the show even more. The son is always seen in a bizarre age-inappropriate sweater.

The kids' life experiences are vast but they do not include common things.

YouTube [schitts creek, fold the cheese] Try to keep up.

Later he looks up "fold the cheese" on the internet and chides his mom for not knowing something so simple. 

I've become fond of these characters. After some internal resistance. Season two ends just as they're becoming quite interesting. The strengths of the characters is just only beginning to show. The acumen that lead to their original wealth and that the kids grew up understanding is only beginning to take hold. They're only beginning to spin gold from hay. The son opens a shop but wants a "soft opening" which his partner does not comprehend and who tries equally hard to understand his whimsical friend prefers a hard full on sink or swim opening. None of the family understands the son's approach. The son invites only a few friends and relatives to see the new shop. The partner extends to a few of his friends. Being a small town they all tell each other so the whole town shows up and patiently waits in line to get in for the opening. Everyone wants to be part of the exclusive opening so its not exclusive at all. Inside, nobody understands the bizarre business model. The town really tries to comprehend the new thing. They try to support it. They buy weird things as gifts for each other, a pen in the shape of a twig tree branch, for example, that cost way more than expected because nothing has price tags on them. 

Lastly, Chris Elliot brings all of his natural weirdness to forefront. He wears a mullet wig and pregnancy-like beer belly prosthetic underneath his shirt to exaggerate being ridiculously out of shape, a puffed rounded beer belly placed on a skinny frame. He mangles every conversation infuriatingly so that his sincerity, his realness, is completely buried beneath facial contortions extreme so that when his authenticity shows it comes as real insight into character created by environment.  

Recommended. With caveat. It's weird and the characters are not instantly appreciable. But it has a lot of very good comedic scenes and to its credit it left out the laugh track so each skit-scene simply ends flatly.