If everything goes according to plan Sunday night, the beloved Canadian series Schitt’s Creek will take a victory lap, months after its series finale, by winning the evening’s top comedy prize—and, we have to presume, a heap more awards for its creator and star Dan Levy and his talented cast mates. But Schitt’s Creek’s road to the virtual Emmys red carpet was far from a conventional one. Here’s how the Rose family unexpectedly became America’s imported sweethearts.
Levy conceived a show about a clueless, obnoxiously rich family who falls on hard times and has to take up residence in a motel in the rural, titular town of Schitt’s Creek. (A town they happen to own, due to a long ago joke gift.) Levy wrote himself as the petulant scion of the family, David Rose, and cast his own father (and Canadian comedy legend), Eugene Levy, as Johnny Rose, the fictional head of the family. To play his on-screen mother, former soap star Moira Rose, Levy reached out to his father’s longtime comedy collaborator, the initially reluctant, Catherine O’Hara. Levy’s real-life sister, Sarah Levy, landed the role of a local waitress, while relatively unknown Canadian actress Annie Murphy snagged the role of the baby of the family: Alexis Rose. The cast was rounded out with a mix of newcomers and Canadian comedy vets, including Emily Hampshire, Jenn Robertson, Tim Rozon, Dustin Milligan, Karen Robinson, John Hemphill, and Chris Elliott.
This family affair was a moderate hit when it debuted in 2015 on the CBC and was co-broadcast in the U.S. on the fairly-hard-to-find cable channel Pop TV. It cleaned up early at the Canadian Screen Awards. So, why did it take so long for the show to garner so many Emmy nominations, let alone potential wins? Well, in large part, Schitt’s Creek can thank a combination of Netflix and a very crafty social media campaign for its eventual, if delayed, cult status in the US.
Not since Breaking Bad saw huge gains in popularity and cultural relevance after it landed on Netflix mid-way through its run has a show been so buoyed up by what is known as “The Netflix Bump,” a phenomenon in which ease of accessibility and bingeability of a currently airing show allows viewers to catch up and ratings to soar. Schitt’s Creek hit the streaming platform in 2017, and slowly but surely grew to cultural ubiquity.
Though it’s somewhat impossible to quantify how much of an impact a canny social media campaign can have, the inundation of endless Schitt’s Creek reaction gifs on Twitter—cleverly branded with trademark yellow and white text so you couldn’t miss which show they hailed from—helped turn Levy, Murphy, and O’Hara’s comically exaggerated expressions into perfect viral marketing for the show. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a number of people that they watched the series only after they had seen the gifs again and again and again on their timelines. There seemed to be an image tailor-made for every mood.
But beyond the streamers and the gifs, there’s a fundamental reason why Schitt’s Creek continued to grow its audience each year—a difficult thing for any show to accomplish in this era of divided audience attention. Simply put, the series just kept getting better. In early episodes, Schitt’s Creek made the same mistake shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place made in their first, bumpy seasons: too much punching down, and not enough punching up. But eventually, like Michael Schur’s stable of feel-good shows, Schitt’s Creek became a destination for folks looking not to mock the unsophisticated Creekers or the hopelessly out-of-touch Roses, but for a chance to spend time in a place where those two wildly different ecosystems could find common ground.