Pitter patter, let's get at 'er! (or, let's talk about LETTERKENNY and SHORESY)

Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #10

How are ya now?

Good, and you?

Not so bad!

I hope everything is going well, in all of your worlds right now. Here in The 716, it’s been a week so the sting of seeing the Buffalo Bills’ season end with a resounding THUD has mostly passed, and now comes the old familiar feeling of “Here’s what they gotta do to get better! Who can they sign? Who can they keep? Who’s in the draft? And…wait ‘til next year!”

That’s that. I don’t have anything major (or even minor) at this point to say about that, so instead, let’s talk about Letterkenny and its spinoff, Shoresy, which I may in fact like even more than the original show.

WARNING: This is a longer than usual letter, because I tend to get long-winded when I’m waxing poetic about something I love.

I tend to take notice when people on social media mention a particular show or movie a lot, and Letterkenny was one of those. I looked it up and learned that it’s a Canadian small-town sitcom that seemed to have quite a following. When we found ourselves in need of a new show to watch, about a year ago, I suggested Letterkenny. We gave it a try, watching the first episode.

Since then we have watched every episode (it had 10 seasons—each show does 6-episode seasons, with occasional extra “special” episodes for events like Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and International Women’s Day—at the time we started it), then we watched its spinoff Shoresy, and then, last fall when we learned that Season 11 was soon to drop, we went right back to the beginning and watched all of it again, including Shoresy.

Thus Letterkenny and Shoresy have become the first shows in the streaming age that we have watched all the way through more than once.

A bit of background, if you’re unfamiliar: Letterkenny started as a series of YouTube shorts called Letterkenny Problems, which followed the quirky doings of the quirky residents of a quirky town called Letterkenny, Ontario. Each episode opens with this text, usually superimposed over a shot of a family farm: There are 5000 people in Letterkenny. These are their problems.

The main focus is on siblings Wayne and Katy. Wayne looks and dresses like your standard small-town farmer dude, with his jeans and his plaid shirts and his constant down-to-earth air. Wayne is always '“chorin’”, he has his own standardized way of greeting people (with which I open this issue!), and he is often uttering aphorisms like “More hands make less work.” But Wayne is by no means a stick in the mud: he puts away the beers with ease, and as the acknowledged “toughest guy in Letterkenny”, he often finds himself putting up his fists (usually taking time to unbutton his cuffs first).

Wayne’s sister, Katy, works as hard as Wayne does, but her look is very different: she is often scantily-clad (“Put more clothes on!” “Not my forte.”) and she has a pretty active love life (the show establishes her early on as bisexual), and she is wicked smart (as demonstrated by her annual dominance of the Letterkenny spelling bee). But little is ever mentioned of Wayne and Katy’s family story: we learn nothing of their parents or much of their histories beyond who their friends are and the fact that when the show starts, Wayne’s relationship with his high-school sweetheart has ended after she cheated. This is not the kind of show where we get revelations about our heroes’ past lives. The main locations for Wayne and Katy’s personal lives are around the farm: the kitchen table, the barn, and most visibly, the produce stand they run out at the corner of their driveway.

Wayne and Katy have friends, though. A ton of them.

The two most important—who are almost there on the farm with them—are Darryl (who goes by “Darry”) and Dan (who adds the adjective “Squirrelly” to his name), who hang. Darry is Wayne’s oldest friend, usually hanging out dressed in mechanic’s coveralls and offering his own occasionally awkward commentary on the topic at hand. Darry is the guy who laughs at his own jokes, often before he makes them. Squirrelly Dan, on the other hand, is a big bearded guy who is always wearing overalls (automatically predisposing me to him!), and who seems like a big lug but who also offers all manner of hilarious and sharp wit, though not without his own verbal tic of adding S’s to words that don’t need them: “That’s what I appreciates about yous, Miss Katys.”

Many scenes in Letterkenny are simply of these four people, or some subset thereof, conversing…and what conversations they have. In fact, it’s those conversations that are the main draw of the show to begin with.

Letterkenny’s dialog is loaded with deft and complex wordplay, and much of it comes so fast that we often found ourselves leaning forward and paying very close attention, just to follow the conversational thread and to not miss any of the jokes that came along the way. When we rewatched the series we found ourselves catching entire sequences of jokes that we missed the first time around. If you’ve watched Letterkenny once and you’re not sure you should watch it again, let me help you: Yes, you should.

All of these qualities extend to the show’s supporting cast, the denizens of Letterkenny itself. There is the local bar owner, who is eternally horny.

There’s the local couple who are also eternally horny, but with one another to the point of being swingers.

There’s the duo of local hockey players, Riley and Jonesy, who manage to convey a sweet lovableness despite also being the kinds of dumb jocks who hang out in the gym constantly and call everybody “boys”.

There’s the group of ne’er-do-well addict types locally called “the Skids”, who all hang out either in their leader’s mom’s basement (and we never meet the mom!) or outside the local convenience store, dancing or playing video games while they are all decked out in black overalls. (Lots of overalls in this show!) The Skids are led by Stewart, a high-strung guy who is always hatching one scheme or another, and one of his followers, a guy named Roald, is in love with Stewart and always addresses him with a high-pitched squeak of “STRT!”

There’s the local auctioneer, who can’t get very far in any conversation without slipping into auction-ese.

There’s the local Mennonite family whose last name is “Dyck” and who are oblivious to the fact that everything they say is a double-entendre.

There’s the nearby community of Native Americans, led by a seductive woman named Tanis, and Letterkenny has been praised for its use of Native actors and its respectful depiction of Native characters.

There is a rotating group of hockey players and gym rats, including an eternally awkward and angry coach, and…a deeply foul-mouthed hockey player named Shore, who goes by “Shoresy”. But we’ll get back to him.

Letterkenny isn’t just about quick-fire wordplay in the dialog; some of its very best scenes have no dialog at all. The show makes terrific use of music, and there are some amazing sequences throughout its run that wordlessly tell the story better than any dialog could. (Example: and this scene introduced me to Toulouse, a Canadian music group that I’ve been listening to a lot over the last 2/3 year.)

What makes a great comedy show isn’t just the jokes, but it’s the characters and the world they inhabit. Any comedy can make you chuckle here and there, but to really laugh and more than that, to remember the things these people say and feel, hinges on being made to care about them. Letterkenny is full of characters I care about, and more than that, the characters care about each other. In this way they create an entire world within the show. Think about the best sitcoms you remember: I’ll bet you recall the locations as much as you do the characters or individual jokes. Jerry’s apartment, Central Perk, Frasier’s apartment, the 4077th, the Nine Nine station house, the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin. Letterkenny does the same thing: Letterkenny, ON is a place I’d like to be able to visit. How I’d love to sit in Modean’s and listen to these people talk to one another, to pull into Wayne and Katy’s driveway and listen to them chat by the produce stand in the hot sun, and to drop by that gym and listen to those two hockey players discuss the merits of “leg day” and find themselves drawn into profane strings of insults from the guy named Shoresy.

Shoresy is in a category by himself.

When I heard they were doing a spinoff series about Shoresy, I was confused as to how that would work.

Shoresy is played by Jared Keeso, who also plays our lead, Wayne. (Keeso is also one of Letterkenny’s creators and main writers.) In Letterkenny Shoresy is never seen from the front, making him almost like that next door neighbor from Home Improvement. He is only seen on Letterkenny from the back or, occasionally, as the pair of feet visible under the door to the restroom stall. There are some hockey scenes where it’s not possible to completely maintain the angles, so Shoresy’s features are obscured by a dark visor. And every time we see him, he is dispensing profanity.

And a lot of it.

He doesn’t turn up very often, but when he does it’s often the funniest thing in any particular episode. Shoresy has an extreme work ethic when it comes to hockey, but he also dishes out foul-mouthed abuse, usually based on Riley and Jonesy’s moms, with the speed and precision of an Uzi.

So, they were going to make a spinoff series about a guy we never see and whose schtick is basically a string of creative “Your mom” jokes?

Well, yes.

Season 10 of Letterkenny had a subplot in which Shoresy is leaving Letterkenny to go play hockey for the team up north in Sudbury, thus setting up the new show. I was still skeptical, though.

Then I watched Shoresy.

It’s somehow both a completely different animal than Letterkenny and very clearly born of the same DNA as Letterkenny. There is no overlap between the two shows other than Shoresy himself, and the town of Letterkenny is mentioned exactly once (I think) in its six episodes, but you can’t miss that they occupy the same world.

And while Letterkenny is a mostly episodic comedy set in a single town, Shoresy tells a story over its six episodes. There are often narrative threads running through Letterkenny, but with Shoresy we get an actual full story…and it leaves itself open at the end for more.

In Shoresy, our hero has gone to play for the last-place Sudbury Bulldogs. In his first scene he’s still not shown other than two feet in the bathroom stall, this time after a period in a hockey game in which his Bulldogs are getting clobbered…but the coach comes in and tries to put a rosy glow on their performance.

Shoresy is having none of it, and he lights into the coach in the profane manner we’ve come to expect. But then he actually emerges from the stall, and we get our first look at him. He walks with a slight hunch, his chin sticks out a bit (partly because of his omnipresent chaw of tobacco), he is never clean-shaven, and like many hockey players, he is missing a tooth. Shoresy dispenses quickly with the device of never showing him, but he manages to not look at all like Wayne of Letterkenny, despite the fact that the same guy plays them. Minutes later Shoresy is in the team owner’s office, being informed that she is going to fold the team and kill the season, because she’s sick of losing and sick of seeing a mostly-empty arena. She just wants “bums in seats”, and since the Bulldogs aren’t producing them, she’s done. Shoresy—who, in a new quirk we didn’t know about, often cries openly when he’s moved—begs her not to shut down the team, and when she asks why, he declares his intention openly:

“This team will never lose again.”

So begins Shoresy’s quest to rebuild this team and its season on the fly. He recruits new players (such as a trio of guys all named Jim, helpfully referred to for the balance of the show as “the Jims”), insults old ones (“You’re a healthy scratch on a last-place team! Hang ‘em up!”), and constantly runs afoul of the team’s owner and her two assistants, the three of whom are the only people who can say “F*ck you, Shoresy!” and have him respond, “For what?” instead of launching into a long string of profane insult. That’s what passes for respect for Shoresy—

—except for sports reporter Laura Mohr, for whom Shoresy is nursing an enormous flame. And he doesn’t keep it a secret in the least way:

Shoresy: I hope you know I’ve been watching Youtube tutorials on how to rub your feet good.

Laura: You going in for the kill?

Shoresy: Oh, you give me a moment, I’ll make it last a lifetime, I swear to God, I’d be so good to ya.

I’d do bad things someplace to be able to write dialog like that, at least once in a while. He promises Laura over and over that he’d “be so good to ya”, and every one of his fantasies involves food: “It’s gonna be you and me and a whole table full of dim sum.”

I can relate to a guy whose love language is food, to be honest. And Laura is smart and somewhat jaded and she doesn’t yield to his charms, but she doesn’t shut them down, either. Laura’s in control…but you get the definite feeling that she’s at least a little bit intrigued.

Shoresy is that classic story, then: the underdog sports story that’s building up to the big match against the team from Sault St. Marie (known to Canadians as “the Soo”, and apparently that team is really good, because everybody in the show at one point or another says, often in an exasperated tone, “the Soo are so f*cking good”). It’s not a championship that’s up for grabs, it’s not a trophy—it’s survival of the team and the respect that comes of committing to the goal and not the love of winning, but the sheer hatred of losing. Nat, the Bulldogs’ owner, sits for an interview with Laura Mohr late in the series, and when asked about her love of hockey players, she says this:

They take losing so personally. They don't just accept blame for a loss, they claim it. They take that burden off of their teammates. "I fucked up, I cost us the game. I need to be better." But when they win, it's never personal. They never take credit. They never say "I." They share it. In other sports, it's, "Me, me, me." But in hockey, it's "We". It's a team.

I am not a hockey fan. I have nothing against hockey; it’s just that I’ve never really had a great deal of opportunity to really get to know the game well beyond “Shoot the puck in the net.” I don’t understand a lot of the sport’s metaphors: when a goalie is playing unusually well, they are said to be “standing on their head”. Why is this? I have no idea. (This has recently been explained to me.) But I love this show to the point of having watched it all the way through twice and I may well do so again before the next awarding of the Stanley Cup. It has to be the mark of a great sports story that you watch it and love it even while not knowing anything about the sport in question, doesn’t it?

Ultimately, Shoresy packs itself so full of heart that at times it seems to be bursting, from Shoresy’s unwitting and unplanned mentorship of a kid who goes from bad hockey player to head coach, to the team’s ritual of enjoying store-bought ice cream cones after each game (they call the cones “sticks”, leading one player to exclaim, “Sticks are unbelievable.”). It’s a show that you sit there watching, while fighting off the urge to shout out, “Yeah!”

And that’s, finally, all I have to say about that.

Time to go for a f*ckin’ Puppers.

Until next time,
-K.