About Schitt's Creek
Schitt's Creek is a Canadian comedy co-created by Eugene Levy and Daniel Levy, premiering in 2015 before finding its international audience via Netflix. The series follows the Rose family — once obscenely wealthy — who are stripped of their fortune by fraud and forced to relocate to Schitt's Creek, a small rural town Johnny Rose once purchased as a joke birthday gift. With no assets remaining except the deed, the family must learn to live within a community they previously would never have visited.
The comedy derives from the collision between the Roses' extravagance and the modest residents of Schitt's Creek. Johnny struggles to find relevance without his money. Moira, a former soap opera actress of baroque wigs and grandiose self-mythology, cannot conceive of a world not revolving around her. David, a pansexual aesthete whose identity was constructed around cultural capital, and Alexis, a former tabloid socialite, must confront who they are without the scaffolding of wealth.
What the series does with unusual skill is reveal, gradually and without sentimentality, that the warmth of Schitt's Creek is exactly what the Roses have always lacked. David's transformation from contemptuous outsider to a man capable of real love is the show's emotional masterpiece, and his relationship with Patrick Brewer becomes one of television's most celebrated queer romances. The show's treatment of LGBTQ characters, depicting a world free of homophobia, was a celebrated creative choice.
Schitt's Creek built its audience through streaming before achieving an explosive breakthrough in 2020, when its final season swept all seven major comedy Emmy categories — an unprecedented achievement. Its warmth, character evolution, and hopeful vision of community resonated during social isolation, making it one of the defining television events of the early 2020s.
