Schitt's Creek

We can't hate the Roses because we are them.

The sitcom Schitt’s Creek is to the 2010s what the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies was to the 1960s. The two shows prove that Americans love a good “rags to riches” or, in Schitt’s Creek's case, “riches to rags to riches” trope. Our penchant for rooting for the underdog is unmatched because our culture has taught us to love them. We are repeatedly told that hard work pays off and the “American dream” is possible and probable with some elbow grease. The underdog whose bootstraps are torn and worn is an underdog we love. I missed ten years of American culture while living overseas and only heard of Schitt’s Creek four years ago when a coworker attempted to imitate the inimitable “Moira Rose” on the show. Still, I wouldn’t watch it until four years later when it finally appeared in my Hulu queue.

Eugene Levy, creator and star of Schitt’s Creek, wanted to comedically explore what would happen if you stripped an extremely privileged family of their money and material possessions and placed them in a small-town setting. The family is forced to adapt to their new world—living at a motel with little money and no connections in a dying town they purchased one year as a joke. After living separate lives under one roof, the Rose family—Johnny (Eugene Levy), Moira (Catherine O’Hara), David (Daniel Levy), and Alexis (Annie Murphy)[1] are forced to rely on one another and the community to survive the “harrowing” experience.

The first episode finds the Roses in a busted motel after losing their fortune through no fault. Immediately, the audience can tell that this family is desperately out of touch with the everyday life of the low to middle-class. Throughout the episode, they leave a trail of insults in their wake as they interact with the townspeople, oblivious to the offenses they’ve caused. They are everything we dislike and assume about stereotypical rich people—self-absorbed, pretentious, and aloof. They throw expected tantrums to express their distaste for their new lives. Their immediate goal is to escape their situation as quickly as possible.

The Rose family is so rotten that even though they did not deserve to have all their money stolen, their detestable behavior makes it easy to laugh at them (it is a comedy, after all). But something happened by the third episode—I began to like them. The more I watched, the more the family endeared themselves to me. Though I still laughed at their foibles, I wanted to see them succeed. I’m not alone in this; an article on Medium says, "Like the softest down comforter or cashmere turtleneck, the Rose family makes us all feel cozy, included, and loved.”[2] But why do we feel this way? Why do we find ourselves loving the Roses even as their selfishness is highlighted continuously throughout the series?

We love them because we are them.

 Schitt’s Creek is not a comedic commentary on rich people; it’s a magnifying glass of American culture. We are the Roses, so we empathize with them, and the characters endear themselves to us because we understand them.

We understand their verbal vomit.

When Donald Trump first came on the political scene, one of the things that attracted people to him was that he said what they were thinking. Even though inappropriate and unkind things ran out of his mouth like melting ice cream on a hot day, I remember people laughing and saying, “He just tells it like it is,” or “He says exactly what I’m thinking, and that’s why I like him!” Here’s the thing: not all thoughts should be shared, and we should exercise restraint from saying them in the first place. Some thoughts, once spoken, are damaging and harmful. In the first couple of seasons of Schitt’s Creek, the Roses dole out their inappropriate and hurtful thoughts to people, and we love them for it. It’s a comedy, so we laugh and cringe, but deep down inside, we admire their candidness, however inappropriate.

We understand their unabashed self-centeredness.

They are uninterested in what townspeople are going through and continually seek advancement and leverage their privilege. One article comments,

“For a show about poverty, after all, Schitt’s Creek can never bear to show us what actual poverty looks like. There’s no opioid epidemic here. No Walmart is destroying local businesses and paying poor wages. Nobody is blaming immigrants and liberals for their problems and spiraling into mires of insane conspiracy theories.”[3]

Here’s the thing: If this show were actually about Schitt’s Creek (the eponymous, fictional town), it would make sense that some of the major small-town issues that plague our country would be highlighted. But the show is not about Schitt’s Creek; rather, it’s about the Roses in Schitt’s Creek—from their perspective. The show does not hit on the town’s pain points that do not directly involve the Roses because the Roses only see what affects them.  I think viewers instinctually understand that. The show is selfish, and ultimately, we are too. We understand the Roses perspective because American life is incredibly individualistic, and we like it that way. We are for ourselves, and it makes sense that the Roses have tunnel vision. They want to advance, and so do we.

If you balk against that idea, think about the thousands of migrants at the border who desperately want to get in. One political tribe unapologetically does not want them in at all, while the other tribe virtue-signals about an open border. However, they also change their tune once the realities of mass immigration begin to affect their way of life (“Not in my backyard!”). We love ourselves; we can’t get over ourselves. We are the Roses.

We understand their desire to move up in the world.

By the end of the fifth season, I thought that Moira would stop complaining about the town that has given her so much (really, it did) and begin to love it. However, even in the second-to-last episode, she throws a fit about how desperately she wants to leave, and by the final episode, she gets her wish—proving that the privileged, even when down and out, stay, well, privileged.

At this point in the series, the audience wants an easy ending. Easy would mean that the townspeople have shown the Roses so much love and acceptance that they decide to stay, yet only one Rose stays. Johnny and Moira get a better offer, and Alexis chooses to advance in her career. That’s real life in America. We often seize the better opportunity— we can’t blame the Roses for doing what we would have done. Wealth is what many Americans desire. Ask the thousands of influencers who make money off Instagram, including the Christian ones. Influence is nice, and wealth is the goal. Ultimately, we understand that the Roses have to do what they have to do because we would likely choose the same.

We understand their slow change.

Finally, I think most viewers identify with the Roses because they see a hope for change in themselves. If the Roses can change, then so can they. What I like about their change is that it is genuine. Johnny and Moira may never have changed their money-loving ways, but they learned to be good parents. Alexis was always self-centered but also learned to care about others. David continued to be vapid, but he learned to love and be loved. Deep in our hearts, we want to believe that we can change, too—knowing that change does not happen overnight. Mental and emotional change takes time. We love the Roses because we witness their hearts transform. The changes are slow enough that by the time the show ends, we still roll our eyes at their hilarious, annoying characteristics, but our hearts warm to see their personal growth, and we desire to grow with them.

It feels silly that a sitcom can make us love people who aren’t real or make us consider changing our lives. That’s the magic of art in all forms—because of its influence, we notice things we may not have in our day-to-day lives, altering our perspective. It is why, to this day, I always check behind the showerhead for spiders after watching the movie Arachnophobia when I was eleven. I was forever changed. Heh.

Thanks, Schitt’s Creek, for making us laugh uproariously and think. Thanks for making us love the Rose family. It’s been real.

Extra Sauce

This Saturday, I will introduce my paid subscriber series, Missionarylore. You can read or listen to this first one for free.

Next week, I will discuss what it was like to be a teenager in a Baptist church and school culture in the 1990s. Spoiler: not good.

Read this: by

Jemar Tisby, PhD

Three Reactions to the PCA Canceling David French

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[1] Schaab, K. (2020). Upending the status quo: Power-sharing and community building in Schitt’s Creek. Critical Studies in Television, 15(2), 148-161. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749602020916449

[2] Mosner, Mallory. “6 Reasons Why ‘Schitt’s Creek’ Is the Worst Show on TV.” Medium. Medium, January 11, 2021. Last modified January 11, 2021. Accessed June 11, 2024. https://mmosner.medium.com/6-reasons-why-schitts-creek-is-the-worst-show-on-tv-1a44d7015114.

[3] Rosenfield, Eric, Amber, and Eric Rosenfield. “The Confused Ideology of Schitt’s Creek.” Literate Machine. Last modified February 23, 2022. Accessed June 10, 2024. https://literatemachine.com/2022/02/23/the-confused-ideology-of-schitts-creek/.