best Schitt's Creek character

You know what, Alexis is growing on me. The lice episode where she's like CONSTITUTIONALLY INCAPABLE of telling Ted she has lice but she's desperate for help and she knows she can trust him, said a lot, I think. No spoilers I have not gotten to "that scene with Ted" yet, don't break my heart before time.

Love David and Patrick, obv, and I admire that Patrick has the confidence to stymy and annoy David esp in his first gay relationship that obviously means a lot to him--I'm in my 40s and I don't know if I could be that annoying without fearing losing someone early on.

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that is what I enjoyed about the show. and there's no shortage of conflict, but it's not the destructive kind. everybody in the town drives each other nuts but they love each other whether they'll admit it or not.

it's also nice watching the Roses go from hating the town and wanting to gtfo to becoming fully integrated within it and having it feel like home.

I wonder if anyone will vote for Ted...

I did enjoy his dadjoeks

I admire that Patrick has the confidence to stymy and annoy David esp in his first gay relationship that obviously means a lot to him--I'm in my 40s and I don't know if I could be that annoying without fearing losing someone early on.

I love the banter between David/Patrick and David/Stevie, but it does bring to mind people who insist on only communicating via sarcasm, which can be exhausting irl

Don't want to come off too negative but to me Eugene is the weakest actor in this show. He just plays the straight man and does a bug eye thing whenever anyone else says something goofy. And I am disappointed his character didn't have a strong trait besides default naive and unsure of himself in ever situation.

Moira is a nightmare, I dread every scene where she makes normal things a complete disaster.

lol like the drug skit episode

Given how often he is surrounded by three larger than life personalities, I think it's the best move to have Eugene Levy play the befuddled straight man.

plus he's really good at it.

exhibit A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg1Uk60rBsc

yeah levy is great

Well point is more that his character kind lacked a distinct personality to me besides "pleasant casually pathetic push over fails at every task". Fish out of water makes sense but he was playing it deep into born yesterday territory and it undermined his backstory as mega successful businessman. Was that intended? Maybe, but I would have rather seen a little bit of a shrewd former shark from Shark Tank somewhere mixed in his approach.

I mean, doesn't season 6 kinda...do that?

I also got the impression that when their assets were seized, they were long divested of ownership in the video empire and living off of their riches and 'investments', and hadn't had to have an active role in a while.

Sure his 100% flailing and failing at all times straight man role is not totally unjustified, but I feel some more dimension would have been welcome. The other 3 characters are memorable and imo his wasn't rich enough (get it?).

Sure his 100% flailing and failing at all times straight man role is not totally unjustified, but I feel some more dimension would have been welcome. The other 3 characters are memorable and imo his wasn't rich enough (get it?).

the Jake romantic triangle subplot was one that didn't go anywhere, other than to give a brief obstacle for David to face when he shows up to pick up Stevie when David and Patrick are using her house for...privacy.

lol @ Moira confusing Asbestos Fest for Schitt's Creek trying to bring back asbestos

I love every ep where Patrick and David perform for each other

Jocelyn's unhinged tirade asking David to host her baby shower puts me in hysterics

(my folks have been watching this for hours)

I'm guessing nobody is going for Wendy Kurtz, who was the worst.

Her and Roland seem like they were written for a different, wackier show.

I didn't mind her, she wasn't really the 'focus' of any of the scenes she was in, other than the one ep where she's having issues with her daughter.

but she definitely shouldn't get any votes in this poll

i get why people don't like roland and i didn't either at first - it was like he'd wandered in from a farrelly brothers movie, instead of this show - but he's crucial imo. he's entitled, moronic, selfish, sexist, has no idea how much people hate him, purely driven by his own appetites... he's pure trump. instead of being born rich he was born in this place. imagine if he'd been born into the kind of family that alexis and david were. so he's kind of a warning: beware. this could be you. and chris eliot is just so good at what he does. in the godfather episode when he's choking on his fried chicken at the cafe i about had a heart attack myself watching him do it.

i can't decide how i feel about stevie. the actor's expressions and acting choices are very strange. i don't know if it works or not.

she does a lot of 'tool matching' with david i.e. they both swallow what they were going to actually say and instead communicate with their eyebrows which is funny but yes she doesn't seem to have a lot of other tools in the bag.

I think she's great! She has a lot of damage and hides behind sarcasm and dry humor as a coping mechanism but we see her walls come down towards the second half of the series.

am halfway thru s4 - lookin forward to everything everybody's hinting at itt including that!

She very much feels like someone whose family tree has a sordid history and she's so desperate to break free of it and be her own person, but she has no idea how...until the Roses pop in and inadvertently help her forge a new path.

(no spoilers!).

Enjoy!

I like how in the show's early going, David realises that Stevie is worth making friends with, but he needs to learn how to communicate with her, not because she's the stupid hick that he would've expected when he learned they were moving there, but because she's so sharp and so sarcastic, it's impossible to know what she really thinks about anything without really paying close attention to her. Which he does.

i agree. their friendship was a moving part of the show. david's development in general was pretty incredible. it's hard to fit that kind of growth into a modern sitcom without making it seem forced or hackneyed.

yes!! man thank you for articulating that so perfectly

xpost

David was incredible precisely because, other than Moira, he seemed least likely to adapt to the new surroundings.

Re Stevie: To understand her, I imagine if I had never been able to leave my rural hometown, pop. 3500, and had been surrounded by the same people I went to school with for the rest of my life; how embittered and isolated I would have been.

It's bleak, folks.

completely otm. he pretty much says exactly that when she inherits the hotel from her late aunt

*she

Like, you are not an appealing person who can make friends in that state. You trust no one and everything you do hurts. It's a lot.

that's also precisely why, while it scares her at first, doing the town's production of Cabaret has a somewhat transformative effect on her

she says a lot of things during S1 that hint at that - something about not wanting to have sex with anybody at the party (after David mentions it) because she knows way too much about everybody in this town to want to do that.

I'll happily wave it away because the series in general is so amazing on so many other levels, but one weak spot is the 'having its cake and eating it too' aspect of the town itself. It seems to vacillate between being a miserable Schitthole and a tiny utopia depending on the immediate needs of the plot.

I mean that's kinda how small towns are? it sucks when you want to go to a movie and you only have one theater and it's 15 miles away and only shows 2 movies, or how the nearest hospital seems to be over a half hour away, and all the nice stuff is in Elmdale.

but sometimes you're sitting in Twyla's cafe and your'e in a good mood with people you cherish and in that moment, it feels like bliss?

I can't imagine how that council gets anything done with Roland, though.

Moira -- overall best imo
Alexis -- idk why but she always cracked me up and I loved her, I loved when she went back to school and the thing with Ted was very sweet even if every younger man in this show is some kind of fantasy boi
Jocelyn -- hilarious, sort of the anti-Stevie

xpost I guess. My own bliss aggressively evaporates the further I move away from my mom's home into my podunk high school town but maybe that's just me.

Jocelyn's near meltdown in the apothecary when she wanted to ask David to do her baby shower sends me into fits each time. it's the friendly demeanor barely concealing bubbling rage that kills me about her. esp with Moira.

I loved the one ep where David mocked the way Alexis talks - "why would I do thahhhht"

I also think Moira is probably the empirically correct answer here, but I'm tempted to vote for Alexis. Anne Murphy does so much--mostly physically--with what starts as a really tired cliche of a character. Also, the running gag of matter-of-factly referring to her ludicrous tabloid past somehow never gets old (contrast with a similar running gag on The Good Place that does get very old).

yeah, I lost track of how many drug lords, sultans, or other people of power she either had to seduce or escape

Annie Murphy is a stealth MVP for sure. Her various character tics are endlessly hilarious. So glad all of the main cast won Emmys this year.

kills me every time

https://media4.giphy.com/media/23k7z58XMbZJgvGX6l/200w.gif?cid=6c09b952sxjzio25ng0lhcwznci1lbqyccmdghuy6pn9yet7&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=200w.gif&ct=g

He (John Hemphill) was a featured performer on SCTV during its final days, when it appeared on Showtime; I don't know if he played any characters other than Happy Marsden, who hosted kids' TV from a barstool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAnS8g0HhIQ

Holy Cow Myonga didn’t know (or remember) he was on the show!

We don’t talk enough about Ted’s hotness.

kind of a bargain bin Chris Evans

Ehh, CanCon hot.

the Alexis-Ted relationship arc and Mutt's part in it is completely fascinating to me. She meets him and he's a genuinely nice awkward dude who is more than a bit square, but really adores her. Then she keeps connecting over and over again with this compellingly charismatic brotastic dude and they have this thoroughly cinematic moment where they declare their attraction to one another, have a brief relationship that has zero depth. And then Ted returns, and he hasn't changed but her perceptions have completely altered and she realizes what she threw away for something emptier. And I think the show is very, very smart to not have had Ted change at all, but her reactions to him change. So many lesser shows and movies lead with a character who's with someone and throws it away for someone a bit flashier, and it's shown to be the right decision, and maybe they have that discarded partner wind up with a similarly supposedly dull secondary character as a consolation prize. I'd be curious if it was their narrative plan from the start, because it feels like a very crafty and heartwarming bait and switch.

That's interesting but I can't think of those shows and movies! I thought the classic thing was for someone to go off with the flashy person then realise the unflashy person was who they really wanted

Yeah the show is at heart all about the family’s growth.

these types of shows and movies definitely exist, I’m not talking about a movie where there’s someone sitting on the sidelines pining for someone else while the latter wastes their time in a crappy relationship and then they get together in the end. It’s more about how Ted was presented as a really square guy, maybe even somewhat of a placeholder til the real thing came along, and the entire arc of Alexis and mutt brought them to the point of this huge moment where they declared how they felt to each other. That’s absolutely the traditional route of some of these stories, but this felt like it was an intentionally misleading arc.

And Mutt wound up being someone who simply vanished and no one seemed to notice.

Sleepless in Seattle is a key example of this. Poor old Bill Pullman. And, if you want to go back to the early days, there's Cary Grant's loving fiancee and secretary in Bringing Up Baby, whom he merrily discards for exciting Katherine Hepburn. I think there are probably loads more.