Letterkenny
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My best buddy MDZ convinced me to watch a show on Hulu called Shoresy. Little did I know that it was downstream of a show called Letterkenny. Both are the inventions of a mad genius named Jared Keeso. As many times as I have alluded to the anti-cosmopolitain charm of the yokel, I can’t think of a more apt expression of that sentiment than this hilariously obnoxious TV series.
It will take a little while to get used to the magnificent, obscure, ideosyncratic lingo, but by the end of the first season, you’ll have the hang. There are setpiece scenes that are reminiscent of Hee Haw, but I can think of no other show that does such a brilliant job of wordplay that’s not Monty Python or the Firesign Theatre. And to think, it was the Millennial Daughter who suffered through an episode of Shoresy without cracking a smile to tell me that this was derivative.
The premise of the show is fairly simple. Letterkenny is a town of 5000 somewheres in Canada where hay grows. The town has three cliques, hicks, skids, hockey players and other local oddballs all of whom have various beefs with each other and various interpretations of local legends. The heart of the show is with the hicks who hang out at the roadside grocery stand and yack on about nothing in that inside-joke sophistication that occasionally yields up some phrase or concept that moves from the yokel lexicon to the wider society. We play witness to this phenomenon as observers to their shenanigans and disputations. At least that’s what I do when I’m not cracking up laughing.
It’s a very obnoxious show on the surface, but nobody is played as stupid or shallow. It has the same kind of appeal as Gilligan’s Island if there were a half dozen sets of castaways and the sexual tension wasn’t always only implied. Plus, you know, Gilligan would occasionally tell the Skipper to … well no maybe if Skipper were Stewart and Gilligan was Roald… You have to see it.
What has to be said, and perhaps this is the place to say it. The popular shows that do any singular justice to what special pleadings the Wokies want deep in their precious little hearts always slam me with their honesty. Letterkenny is just such a show, which panders to no one and makes no apologies because the decency and emotional honesty of every character (except the degens from upcountry) is subtle and sometimes profound. This is the show that South Park might have been if we didn’t have an eternally snarky counter-culture. Or, put another way, I think South Park is ridiculous, except for that one movie back in 1999. That was peak South Park. Still, Letterkenny doesn’t need to make much commentary in any overt way on the greater culture, and when it does, it doesn’t capture or transform the characters in any profound way. We just get to see the biorhythms of their ups and downs and doldrums, which makes for spectacular humor.
Start with Glen, the homosexual youth minister at the local church. He’s both a parody and a conflicted soul who truly detests sin without detesting himself. Then there’s Stewart, the goth DJ and drug dealer who is both esoteric and banal. There’s Gail, the gawkiest, thirstiest, hip-swiveling wannabe sexpot bartender ever. The hockey boys. Naive and lovable lunkheads desperately trying to improve their lot. On center stage is Wayne, the laconic, shirt-tucking, squinty-eyed farmer, emblematic of hard work, decency, love of dogs, beer and the honor of his sister & best buds which means lots of fistfights.
I relate to it as a homie. The Hicks’ fruit stand is the front porch of the kids next door where we talked our way through the basics of our basic world. Who was the big dog when it came to scrapping? Who was the hottest hottie? Who was the craziest fool? What’s new in the neighborhood? How are we going to keep our reputations? What are the boundaries of our lives and how does it shape up with the others in the vicinity? Friends. Enemies. Alliances. Loves. Breakups. Holidays. Sex. Sports.
If I love peasants, it’s because before the global cataclysm that ignites the activist impulse in the liberal aristocracy, I count the souls in each of these townies. None of them will ever be professional anything, but in this show they deal directly and pay the price for all of their ventures to the edge of chaos from the center of their small town order. They work through, one way or another, their conflicts with each other like little lovable crime families. Letterkenny shows us how we’re all small town crime families. Or something like that.