My favorite show on television now is "Better Call Saul."
You probably know about that show; you might have read something I wrote about Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) a year or so ago. Lots of people write about "Better Call Saul" — Donna Bowman's recaps, available via her substack (substack.com/profile/1169726-donna-bowman) are indispensable — so maybe we don't need someone else weighing in on the series again.
So I'm going to write about my second-favorite current TV show.
It's called "Shoresy," which premiered on Crave, a Canadian subscription video-on-demand service, earlier this year. You can watch it on Hulu, where it premiered in May, a couple of weeks after it premiered in Canada. The first season is six episodes long, and each episode runs between 20 and 30 minutes, so if you're inclined, you can binge the whole season in a evening.
I would recommend you not do that; furthermore I'd recommend you not watch "Shoresy" at all until you've watched at least a few episodes of the show from which it was spun off, "Letterkenny," 10 seasons of which are also available for streaming on Hulu.
"Letterkenny" began as a web series and made its debut on Crave in 2016. If you are confused as to how there can be 10 "Letterkenny" seasons when the show's only been on the air six years, well, they do things differently in Canada.
Anyway, "Letterkenny" is about the people who live in Letterkenny, a fictional rural community in northern Ontario loosely based on the hometown of one of the show's creators and stars, Jared Keeso. He's a former junior hockey player whose family owns a 150-year-old sawmill in Listowel, an unincorporated community in Ontario with a population of about 7,000.
"There are 5,000 people in Letterkenny," we are reminded via a superimposed caption every show. The series is about "their problems."
"Letterkenny" is a stylized, profane and remarkably intelligent riff on "The Andy Griffith Show" with Keeso as Wayne, the town's resident benevolent badass and zen decider, a barnyard brawler who's consistently on the right side of history.
Wayne operates a farm and produce stand with his sister Katy (Michelle Mylett, a former cheerleader for the BC Lions, the professional football team based in Vancouver, British Columbia) with the help of their friends Daryl (Nathan Dales) and Squirrely Dan (K. Trevor Wilson).
Most of the episodes involve minor conflicts between the diverse groups who occupy the town, including the "skids" (goth drug users and dealers), "hicks" (Wayne, his crew, and other farmer types), local Mennonites, Quebecois and their subset the "degens (degenerates) from Up North," hockey players, First Nation tribes, the town's barely closeted Christian minister (co-creator Jacob Tierney) and lascivious barkeep Gail (Lisa Codrington).
As a situation comedy, "Letterkenny" is straightforward; the plots are simple (though details are never forgotten — often incidents from earlier seasons are recalled) and while Wayne's stoicism is often played as judgmental, the overall tone of the show is tolerant, sex-positive and welcoming of diversity.
It's also often quite rude and profane and so quickly paced that even sharp-eared viewers might be encouraged to flip on the English-language subtitles.
But what's really ingenious about "Letterkenny" is that even as it leans into the various small-town stereotypes, it equips almost each and every one of its characters with a quick hyper-verbal wit and the ability to converse fluently on all manner of esoteric matters. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and can express it in a sophisticated, intelligent manner.
Letterkenny is a town full of Sheriff Andys, even if they don't necessarily read as upstanding citizens.
Squirrely Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), Daryl (Nathan Dales) and Wayne (Jared Keeso) are at Daryl’s “Super Soft” birthday party in Hulu’s “Letterkenny.”
CHANGE OF SCENERY
"Shoresy" diverges from Letterkenny in that it removes the action from a small town to a small city — from Letterkenny to Sudbury, Ont., a city that's a little smaller than Little Rock in terms of population. (Both "Letterkenny" and "Shoresy" are filmed in Sudbury, a fact that has endeared the creators to local residents. Think what it would mean if one of the most popular television series in this country were filmed right here in Arkansas.)
The titular Shoresy (Keeso) was (and maybe is; the series has been picked up for another season) a character on "Letterkenny," an uncouth foul-mouthed hockey goon with a penchant for older women whose face was always obscured. In "Shoresy," he's joined a struggling minor league ice hockey team, the Sudbury Bulldogs, that's in danger of folding.
If "Letterkenny" can be viewed (through a squint) as a covert remake of "The Andy Griffith Show," the resemblance between "Shoresy" and the 1977 George Roy Hill hockey comedy "Slap Shot" that stars Paul Newman as the aging player/coach of a minor-league team on the brink of extinction is hard to miss.
In "Slap Shot," Newman's Reggie Dunlop concocts a scheme to get his team winning through intimidation; he keeps their hopes alive by fanning rumors that the team's owner is negotiating to sell them to a Florida retirement community.
In "Shoresy," Shoresy approaches the team's general manager Nat (Brazilian-Canadian actor Tasya Teles) with a proposition. If she'll give him control of the team, allow him to appoint useless player Sanguinet (Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat) coach, bring in some new players (including three First Nation players all named Jim, a direct reference to the thuggish trio of Hanson brothers who invigorate the team in "Slap Shot"), the Bulldogs will never lose another game. If they do, Nat can go ahead and fold the team.
But as in "Letterkenny," the basic plot hardly matters. What does matter is the granular depiction of what it must be like to be a member of a minor league hockey team. Most of the actors in the show have a hockey background, and several are former professional players. They skate and shoot and body check like real hockey players because they are (or were) real hockey players.
I don't know much about hockey, but I know when something feels authentic. "Shoresy" feels authentic.
"Shoresy" is every bit as smartly written (and ultimately as humane and quotable) as "Letterkenny." It's the most lovable show on television. It probably features the most adventurous curses. It's the exact opposite what some people think of when they think about a TV show.
TV'S EVOLUTION
Television started out as an adventurous medium, a laboratory for technical innovation and new ideas in storytelling. The first Golden Age of television is widely seen as being bookended by the premiere of the "Kraft Television Theatre" on May 7, 1947, and the signing off of the last live broadcast of "Playhouse 90" in 1957.
Early American television was critically acclaimed and internationally lauded. Even pointy-headed intellectuals were impressed by its promise and the quality of the programming.
But quality programming is hard work and expensive to produce. So as television became established as the country's most important mass medium, network executives began to adopt a philosophy that would become known as the "least-objectionable programming" principle.
They reasoned that, in an environment where people had — at most — three networks from which to choose, they needn't necessarily produce high-quality entertainment like the storied anthology and variety shows of the Golden Age.
All they had to do was give people unobjectionable material that they wouldn't turn off. Even by the mid-1950s, the television habit was so ingrained among the general public that it seemed the default setting for the magic box was "on."
People would watch anything so long as it didn't upset them. So the trick became not upsetting them. (This principle is still at work — most apparent in the ways that cable news networks tailor programming to affirm rather than challenge the preconceived notions of their audience. Or think about how in "Top Gun: Maverick," great pains are taken not to identify the "rogue nation" whose nuclear weapon program precipitates the climatic raid; they want to sell tickets in China too.)
So, beginning in the mid-'50s, television became very good at not upsetting people.
It also gained a reputation among snooty critics and other discriminating types as a vacuous medium. This reputation wasn't about the 1959 quiz show scandal.
Quiz shows had become a prominent part of prime-time TV by 1956, when the networks aired 16 evening quiz shows, six of which were among the 30 highest-rated shows of the season. By 1958, rumors were circulating that — to heighten and maintain dramatic tension — many of these shows were fixed.
These rumors were confirmed on Nov. 2, 1959, when Charles Van Doren — a well-connected professor at Columbia University who leveraged his popularity as a big winner on NBC's quiz show "Twenty-One" into a guest hosting job on NBC's morning show "Today" — confessed to a congressional committee he'd been supplied answers before each appearance on "Twenty-One." Soon it became clear that this sort of manipulation was common in the genre; most '50s quiz shows were rigged in the same way most of today's "reality" shows are scripted.
'VAST WASTELAND'
Television's reputation reached a low point in 1960 when Newton Minow, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under John F. Kennedy, delivered what has become known as the "vast wasteland" speech.
Minow had praise for many of the Golden Age anthology dramas that had been retired by the networks, as well as some news documentaries and especially the televised 1960 presidential debate (which famously helped put the telegenic John F. Kennedy in office over Richard Nixon). He allowed that "when television is good ... nothing is better."
But, he continued, when television was bad, "nothing is worse." And it was, in 1960, very bad indeed.
Minow challenged television executives and station owners to watch their own programming. If they did that, he said, they would be confronted with a "a vast wasteland" of "game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons," which served primarily as mortar for the raison d'etre of the medium: commercials.
While Minow conceded the FCC, the regulatory agency of the U.S. government that oversees broadcasting, could not exercise prior restraint to keep any content off the air, and that it had no intent to "muzzle or censor broadcasting," it was charged with ensuring that stations operate within the "public interest, convenience, and necessity."
Since all broadcast stations were licensed by the FCC, the agency had the power to rescind or to decline to renew the licenses of any station it decided was not acting in that interest.
"I understand that many people feel that in the past licenses were often renewed pro forma," Minow said. "I say to you now: Renewal will not be pro forma in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license."
MINOW NOW
Newton Minow is 96 years old. (His daughter Nell Minow is, among other things, a film critic who writes under the rubric the "Movie Mom." She looks at popular culture through the lens of parenting. She also writes a lot about business and the responsibilities of C-suite level executives. In some circles, she's known as the "CEO Killer." I didn't know Nell Minow, who often writes for rogerebert.com, was related to Newton until I started researching this piece; it is too delicious to leave out. She's working the same patch her father did, trying to shame rich and important people into doing better for the community at large.)
Minow's "vast wasteland" speech is considered an important moment in the history of television, but it's debatable whether it had much impact on programming. A lot of people agreed with what he said, but others took it as so much elitist nattering. It is said that "Gilligan's Island" creator Sherwood Schwartz named the USS Minnow after Minow, and did not mean it kindly.
Anyway, what happened was that television got much vaster than it was when Minow was FCC chairman; he could not have envisioned this, though he did envision that one day it would be no big deal for us to watch live broadcasts bounced off satellites from around the world.
But he recognized — in a speech 11 years ago — that the increasing vastness of television had solved the wasteland problem. Television used to be a utility; you turned on the tap and what was on offer spilled out.
Now it's a huge buffet, or maybe like the Crater of Diamonds. The biggest shows --the biggest hyped, on the biggest networks — are always going to be the ones that conform to the "least-objectionable programming" principle. That's how life is — fast food predominates; the typical best seller list is full of bad books; the most popular products are hardly ever the best.
But the vastness of the medium allows almost any competent creator to get their vision before some sort of audience, and the interconnectedness of the digital world allows us to seek out and find odd and eccentric and somehow perfect little gems like this. Television executives aren't really in charge of programming anymore; the viewer is in charge of programming.
You get to choose what you consume, and while some people find this onerous — which is why Netflix has a button you can push to watch something selected for you based on mysterious algorithms — it removes the need for any sort of Big Brother agency to look out for your interests.
If you're watching dull, dumb television these days, that's on you.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com