Lots of laughs in store with ‘Schitt’s Creek’
The strangest thing has been happening to me this week and I don’t know at all how to explain it. Every time I tell people about this new sitcom I’m reviewing, they burst out laughing – even before I tell them a thing about the show.
Darndest thing, but whatever: Some people have a weird sense of humor, I guess.
The show itself was created by Eugene Levy (“American Pie” and various Christopher Guest movies) and his son, Daniel, and premieres Wednesday on the Pop channel, which used to be TVGN. You can locate the channel on Comcast, Dish or DirecTV by going to www.poptv.com
The 13-episode, single-camera sitcom is called “Schitt’s Creek” and focuses on the family of Johnny Rose, a formerly stinking rich video store magnate whose wife, Moira (Catherine O’Hara), is a famous soap opera actress, and whose children, Alexis (Annie Murphy) and David (Daniel Levy), are spoiled urban airheads.
Suddenly finding themselves all but penniless after Johnny’s money manager absconds with most of their money, the Rose family is left with one asset: The backwater town of Schitt’s Creek, which Johnny bought years ago for $80,000. With nowhere else to live and no other way of making money, they all go, quite reluctantly, up “Schitt’s Creek,” encountering a pot-bellied weirdo mayor named Roland Schitt, played by Chris Elliott, and various locals whom the Roses immediately dismiss as beneath their station.
As in the Christopher Guest movies for which Eugene Levy and O’Hara are so well known, “Schitt’s Creek” trades on the most indelible human trait of all: Cluelessness. The Rose children are motivated primarily by entitlement. Alexis is a party girl socialite who doesn’t realize she’s basically a bimbo. David is an indefatigable hipster whose clothes are both expensive and ridiculous, especially when he tries to mingle with the residents of the small town at tailgate parties or at the local supermarket, where he briefly gets a job as a bag boy.
Moira is as over the top in person as she no doubt is in her TV soap opera. She’s famous for her “bitch look,” and Roland is so in awe of being in the same room with her, he goads her to slap him the way she slaps men on the show. She demurs at first, then lets loose with solid double slap, pushing him very near quasi sexual ecstacy.
Elliott is hilarious as Roland, a modern-day Gomer Pyle with the manners of a farm animal, and, of course, the chemistry between Eugene Levy and O’Hara is as potent as ever.
Make no mistake: This is pure comedy, with no hidden social agendas, no thinly disguised commentary on human behavior, nothing at all of much import, except a whole lot of laughs.
Now if I could only figure out what’s so funny about the show’s name.