Last week, news broke that Jared Keeso’s long-running, beautifully vulgar Canadian sitcom Letterkenny would be coming to an end with its next season. This revelation wasn’t wholly surprising insofar as a) Letterkenny is coming up on its 12th season, which is a lot; b) the show’s 11th season had ended on a weirdly dour note that seemed to imply everybody involved was getting too old for kicking the crap out of Canada’s various degens from Upcountry every year; and, c) Keeso has been pretty busy of late, most notably with his spin-off series Shoresy. That show just released its entire second season on Hulu (in the States, anyway—it aired on actual TV in Canada) less than a week before the Letterkenny news broke.
Shoresy is, in its own weird way, an easier sell to the masses than Letterkenny, despite busting out some variant of “fuck” in its dialogue every six seconds or so, and being based around spinning off a title character whose role in the mothership series was almost entirely defined by his extremely detailed descriptions of having sex with his fellow hockey players’ moms. The core of the series is that simplest of feel-good premises: an underdog sports comedy about a crew of lovable losers trying to drag themselves up from the bottom of the rankings. (Taika Waititi is gearing up to hoe this exact same row with his upcoming movie Next Goal Wins, albeit probably without quite so many references to getting “squeezers off the side of our party island in Wasaga Beach.”)
Keeso (who played the character in Letterkenny, too, albeit with his face perpetually hidden) stars in the series as Shoresy, an aging hockey player with a taste for brutal hits and a bone-deep hatred of losing that he struggles to impart to his fellow players on a minor-league hockey team in Northern Ontario. In the first season, he pledged to the team’s frustrated owner, Nat (Tasya Teles), that the team would never lose again, on pain of being dissolved; the second opens with him, somewhat improbably, having (mostly) kept that pledge, with the Sudbury Bulldogs on a perpetual winning streak as the league’s champions. (It’s well in keeping with Keeso and long-time collaborator Jacob Tierney’s disinterest in traditional drama that the actual championship victory is relegated to the space between seasons; that’s not the story they’re interested in telling.) Shoresy’s second season, then, is a far less common, and far more interesting, sports narrative than its already-good first: How do you keep winning, when the distractions and fatigues of constantly being the best start to wear on you? And how far can you actually go?
The heart of it all is Shoresy himself, who represents everything that is good—and a bit that’s not, probably—about Keeso’s incredibly distinctive writing and acting styles. Noted for both his endless trash-talking and his tendency to cry during the Canadian national anthem, Shoresy is a joke character whom the show itself only rarely treats like a joke; as voiced in a fast-talking, heavily accented falsetto by Keeso, nearly everything about him is deliberately ridiculous and kind of awful, except his passion for his life’s work. Rude, violent, impeccably witty, and sometimes shockingly sweet—as in the one episode per season we get to spend with his utterly devoted adopted family, with Canadian comedy legend Scott Thompson playing his equally hilarious and brutal dad—Shoresy is surface-level grotesque, mid-level hilarious, and deep-down beautiful.
Which is, in some ways, Keeso and Tierney’s whole thing. Letterkenny and Shoresy are both filled with touches that are, at first glance, at least mildly repellant—most notably, both shows’ endless interest in putting female characters in the skimpiest outfits available and then having the camera leer at them in slow-motion. Beneath those elements, though—the trappings of small-town boredom for one show, hockey-minded meathead-ism the other—runs an incredible verbal wit that’s unlike pretty much anything else on TV. Shoresy, if anything, is even more devoted than the original show to the strange rhythms of repeated lines, escalating callbacks, and the deliberate calls and responses its characters speak. (Not that either series is simply an exercise in strange conversational structures and horrifying euphemisms for human genitalia; few shows on TV can deliver a more brutally hilarious one-liner or takedown.) And then Keeso and Tierney use that incredible comedy apparatus to sucker-punch you with moments of genuine human connection, as when Shoresy confesses to his local reporter crush (Camille Sullivan) in season two that he keeps playing crappy hockey in a crappy league because it’s the only place on Earth where he feels like he can be himself.
Shoresy, and Letterkenny, are tricky shows to blindly recommend to others, because they both require a sort of road to Damascus moment to click. You have to spend some time with the dialogue, let it kick around in your head, and then have the realization that nobody else on TV is working at this pace, and this intensity, of rapid-fire joke-telling—not even the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia crew, who are probably the closest Stateside equivalent—in order to understand why both shows create fanatics. The payoffs are incredible, though: gut-bustingly funny comedies that deliver just enough of a bracing dose of real feeling to work as actual human stories. Letterkenny is ending (with its final batch premiering December 26), but Shoresy—which has already been renewed for its third season—is a worthy successor.