Image via IMDB.
Schitt’s Creek, the 6-season series first airing on Pop TV and CBC Canada in 2015, then on Netflix, came to a close on April 7th of 2020. The show that started with the once arrogant, needy and unhappy family of Rose’s closed on a Rose family who found peace, love and themselves within small town life, their new friends and the pieces they picked up along the way. There are a lot of things that can happen over 6 years and Schitt’s Creek didn’t do a whole lot to connect their plot with the world events, but they did well because of the escape factor. A lot of us needed something to drown out everything else and to laugh to, and Schitt’s Creek is an easy watch with a comedic script that does this very well.
Johnny, Moira, David and Alexis come on the screen first when their mansion home and possessions are being taken away and they’re being kicked out. They lose their assets, all except for a small town that Johnny (father) bought for David (son) as a joke present. This is the town of Schitt’s Creek.
Having no place else to go, the Rose’s arrive at their new humble abode, the Rosebud Motel, run by Stevie Budd. They slowly, but surely, eat their big slice of humble pie as the show presses on, getting less grossed out about the motel and less outrageous about their lack of personal belongings.
They go on to have half-hour adventures focused around becoming better people, meeting regular old town folks and getting normal jobs. Main characters; Johnny, Moira, David, Alexis, Stevie, Roland, Joselyn, Twyla, Patrick and Ted follow through with relationships (David and Patrick, Joselyn and Roland, Alexis and Ted, Johnny and Moira), tragedies and a sort of coming of age while in adulthood storyline.
Reviews and articles:
In a review on Vulture, the unlikeliness of the popularity of the show was explained in numbers and statistics, saying, “In 2016, ratings for season two jumped 26 percent (to 331,000 linear viewers) over the show’s freshman outing. And then, in January 2017, Schitt’s Creek debuted on Netflix”
The impact of Netflix on linear ratings happened right away.
Schitt’s Creek has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, with fantastic and unpromising reviews alike.
Another article from The List talked about what fans don’t know about the show, saying;
Catherine O'Hara surprised the entire cast and crew of Schitt's Creek with her bizarre accent on the first day.
Annie Murphy added "David" onto the end of lots of her lines herself.
Annie Murphy's "broken wrist" Alexis hands on Schitt's Creek were inspired by the Kardashians.
Noah Reid composed his Schitt's Creek cover of "Simply the Best" himself.
Dozens of fans have left real reviews for the fictional Schitt's Creek motel online.
Similar shows and comparisons:
There is never a shortage of shows trying to make people laugh, shows about family, and shows with a similar premise to Schitt’s Creek (riches to rags or vice-versa).
Arrested Development is one of these similar shows. The show follows a family who, in episode one, get a huge change when their father and business owner gets arrested, hence the name. They have to find their way through new relationships, new jobs and new ideas just as the Rose’s do.
Following a similar plot line, Grace and Frankie are married to two gay men who come out and end up together. While they begin season 1, Episode 1 finding this out, they slowly form a bond, a friendship and a lifelong love for one another. There are many articles stating that Grace and Frankie is extremely similar and is what you should watch after viewing Schitt’s Creek.
Comparing the 3, they are all centered around rich and privileged families that unexpectedly lose everything. Schitt’s Creek is great because the show proves to the audience time and time again that the Roses are genuinely good people.
All three shows characterize class, wealth, family and disaster. While they all start with something bad happening to main characters/a big life change, they also all show the characters changing in between the pilot to the finale. The change isn’t always juristic, as the characters in Arrested Development don’t really change for the better, but they do go through changes in roles, age, look, etc.
The audience the three shows appeal to is also super similar as it’s people looking for comedic relief who are also probably fans of one of them who caught wind of the others being similar and gave them a watch. They’re also probably between the ages of 18-45ish as this seems like the shows’ target audiences.
The point of these three shows seems to be a combined message of families getting closer because of hardship, funny people joining forces to create something incredible and underlying love stories that are completely unexpected, even if the love in question is just the characters feeling like they finally belong.
I think these three shows do a lot, including showing the above messages and allowing audiences to feel this way too, maybe allowing them to better accept their own situation.
In the end, Grace and Frankie become friends and find themselves in new ways, Grace being less angry with the world and less stuck up and Frankie becoming more trusting and not brushing everything off and pretending she’s chill all the time.
Arrested Development “ends” when Lucielle 2 dies and Michael and George Michael drive off in the stair car, but then the show is picked up by Netflix for another season. Netflix created a show ending where nobody really gets a happy ending. It’s clear that even at the end of it all, nobody in the Bluth family has really changed.
And then there’s Schitt’s Creek. Concluding in a wedding, a heartbreak, a business venture, a storefront, and a new home, Schitt's Creek ends on a happy note for all.
David and Patrick are the ones who marry, Moira and Johnny move to California for Moira’s show’s revival, Alexis having plans to accept a PR position in New York City and Stevie gets her chain of Rosebud motels with her business partner, Johnny Rose.
The show closes out on Moira and Johnny getting into their car and driving off, leaving 4 teary-eyed young people hugging in front of the motel. They’re leaving Schitt’s Creek, but not before Johnny has the driver stop so he can take one more look, camera then panning to the town sign, which was a point of a few early episodes for being accidentally inappropriate. The sign is still inappropriate, but now it’s inappropriate with the Rose family featured on it.
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