Journal of a Plague Year: Schitt's Creek as pastoral

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

…

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.  

                                                       Duke Senior, As You Like It

Starting in the early 2000s, as I grew tired of the ritual humiliation of women in film, I gradually developed a theory of l'ecriture humaine or humane literature. Inhumanity is particularly inscribed in the media we watch--miniseries like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, and more subtly, I would argue, in series like Downtown Abbey, inherently cruel because it celebrates, beautifies, and falsifies a hierarchy based on birth. A humane literature celebrates the domestic, the empathic, the cycles of life, flattens hierarchy, and avoids ritual humiliation of the weak. It tells truth, not lies, shows sentiment, not sentimentality, and tells difficult stories with an ethical compass pointing at empathy and compassion.

Therefore, I delight in a television series with a terrible name: Schitt's Creek. The name was vigorously opposed by the Canadian network that first aired the series; it was just as vigorously defended by the series' creators, who took out a phone book to convince their corporate sponsors that Schitt is, in fact, a common name.

The Roses: Johnny, next to him Stevie, who manages the motel, Alexis, David, and Moira

The series is in ways reminiscent of the iconic 1960s Green Acres, though that earlier series veers far closer to madcap self-ironic parody than this. Schitt's Creek is a gentler fantasia. It is in a classic tradition of pastoral--not Raymond Williams' enameled pastorals of The Country and the City, never Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." The show is pastoral in the tradition of As You Like It, which presents the absurd and impossible to highlight the tantalizing if fantastic ideal of the gentle as within grasp. Paradoxically, the Roses become safer as they lose all their money: a radical upending of the logic of the security of wealth. The predators once surrounding them become distant in Schitt's Creek, reduced to the occasional snobs who descend, sneer, and seeing nothing to value, gallop off with haste.

Melancholy, too, hovers beneath the surface in As You Like It and Schitt's Creek: life can overturn for us at any time, sadness and trouble descend, and then we discover where our values lie.

As Jaques in As You Like It grieves the wounded stag, the Roses view life from below. 

The show has a personal connection for me to Covid: in Mexico, as I began to comprehend the enormity of the pandemic, we started to stay home.We were unable to access much via Roger's iPad (American series can be blocked in Mexico)--but we did find Schitt's Creek. Without the pandemic, it is unlikely we would have watched this show.

The premise resonated with me initially because it paralleled my experience: the fabulously wealthy Rose family has lost all its money, so they are left only with a small town--Schitt's Creek--that family patriarch John Rose once bought as a joke. They move there because they can have free lodging in two rooms in a shabby motel.

I have never been anywhere close to wealthy, and our family has never lost all its money. But we did, for other reasons, move to a small town in the Midwest twelve years ago, six weeks before the 2008 market crash.

In Schitt's Creek, the family consists of the older Roses, John, who once owned a chain of video rental stores, and Moira, once a successful "B" actress in soaps and similar vehicles. They have two adult children, the beautiful and personable Alexis, and the sensitive, fashion-conscious bi-sexual David.

The family in the parents' motel bedroom. Moria, the mother, has decided to return the $3,700 Harrod's gown she is wearing that the entire family admires on her: the family needs the money. There is melancholy in Moira's "maybe someday" ... a someday that probably will never come. 

Schitt's Creek is a hard landing for the Roses, who are used to a far more urbane world with more options, more sophistication, and more taste. (The artistic adult son, David gets a job at The Blouse Barn in a nearby town; Alexis becomes a receptionist for a vet.)

In my favorite episode thus far, the older Roses go to a restaurant in a nearby town for an anniversary dinner.  There they meet up with old friends from their former wealthy east coast world, people who happen to be passing through en route to somewhere else. The Roses are then joined by their new friends, the mayor of Shitt's Creek, Roland Schitt, and his wife Jocelyn. The east coast friends' put downs of the place--how awful, backward, and ugly--what a joke--are hurtful to the Roland and Jocelyn, and finally so offensive to John (Johnny) that he delivers a heartfelt defense of his new home. What makes this scene satisfying is its truth: how often have I had to endure friends laugh at my new small town, put it down, and assert a false superiority, over it. These people think they are superior--why? Because they have more degrees (if not more real education in the truest sense of the word), better "taste," live or have lived in more affluent places with more restaurants, more culture, more amenities, a nicer house, have perhaps travelled to more places or assume they have, are, to their own minds, more sophisticated.  But what are you if you spend all your time puffing yourself up by putting others down? Or if you judge a place only by its superficial prettiness or its affluence? Johnny shows a true humanity in his ability to see through the facade of his new home to the worth of the new place and new people he has been thrust amongst.

“Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream” Bachelard

It would be easy, if one only looked at outward wrappings--generic plots, probably well worn when "I Love Lucy" brought them to television, overly abrupt cuts,  jokes that fall flat-- to dismiss the show as drivel (though it has been nominated for Emmys and won other awards). A far crueler series, such as Downtown Abbey, certainly appears far more polished, appealing, and civilized while valorizing a cruel social hierarchy completely missing from the pastoral equalitarian world of Schitt's Creek.

The settings are small scale and domestic: the motel rooms, a local restaurant, the vet's, the town hall. The Roses have to worry about money. When they finally get some, all they can afford to buy for a car is a 1978 Lincoln.

Moira at the local restaurant with Twyla, the waitress. Moira wears one of the upper class designer outfits of her former life: one of the show's running gags is the satirizing of grotesque fashionista dress.

The younger Roses begin to be able to establish long term relationships with other people, something not a part of their former superficial, high powered lives where human beings could be used and discarded like consumer goods--as could they, who carry multiple scars of rejection and hurt.

Much of the gentle humor of the series, however, lies in the vanities and foibles of the characters: selfishness, vanity, ego, manipulativeness--but none of this is ever hardened or mean.

What I like too about the series is that "winning" is never framed as the outcome of ruthlessness (though, admittedly, sometimes underhandedness works) or cruelty, and being the "top dog" is never valorized: there never is a top dog in this world where, like the Forest of Arden, everyone is roughly equal. In fact, there is no real "winning,"  except as the characters make it decently through a day. Women are never ritually humiliated because this fantasia is not set in a real patriarchy. We learn from this series, as in As You Like It, that:

gentleness ... more than ...force move[s] us to gentleness.

In the loneliness of pandemic's social isolation, I will miss this family and this show when the series ends.