Creek Peek

Over the past couple months I've managed to finish all five seasons and 66 episodes of Schitt's Creek--just in time for its final season in January.   Each episode is only 22 minutes so it wasn't hard to burn through them.

The concept is the superrich Rose family--two parents and two adult children--lose all their money so are forced to live in a cheap motel in a town that they own, a town considered so worthless they're allowed to keep it. (A concept I don't get, but no matter.)

In the first season they spend a lot of time plotting to unload the place and move out.  The show improves quite a bit in later seasons when the family settles in and stops trying to leave.  The father (Eugene Levy) helps run the motel, the mother (Catherine O'Hara) gets on the town council and returns to her acting career, the son (Daniel Levy, who created the show with father Eugene) opens up a store in town and finds a business and romantic partner, and the daughter (Annie Murphy) has a relationship with a local veterinarian.

Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara were great working together on SCTV and in Christopher Guest movies, but here they take a back seat to the kids.  Levy is fine as the father, which he plays fairly straight, though O'Hara is a bit too much of a caricature as the affected wife.

The daughter, with her cutesy, singsongy way, and the son, with his overdramatic manner, steal the show.  At the beginning they threaten to be one-note, forever complaining about losing their old lifestyle, but eventually they go native and develop into full-blown characters.

The supporting cast isn't bad, though I found the various hunky guys who date the Rose kids the least interesting.  And Chris Elliott as the town's crude mayor never quite finds his comic footing.  But the women in the cast do pretty well.

There's Sarah Levy as Twyla, the waitress as the local diner who's a bit of a sad sack.  There's Karen Robinson as the sardonic Ronnie.  There's Jenn Robertson as the mayor's put-upon wife.  And best of all is Emily Hampshire as Stevie, the motel clerk amused by all the goings-on.

The show is no classic, and while diverting is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. But it's worth checking out.