You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know anything about Letterkenny. It came more or less out of nowhere, debuting as a series of one-man web videos starring creator Jared Keeso, then transitioned to a full-blown sitcom on something called “Crave TV” (apparently a video-on-demand service in Canada), before finally ending up on Hulu with little promotion or fanfare. If you’re a regular binge-watcher, you might have noticed a few commercials for it, but otherwise, it’s yet another Canadian export that flew under the radar of American audiences. And that’s too bad, because it’s one of the sharpest, funniest, and warmest comedies to show up in years.
Letterkenny follows the lives of disparate but intertwined groups of people in a small town in rural Ontario. The protagonists are the Hicks: farmer and time-tested “toughest guy in Letterkenny” Wayne (Keeso, who writes most of the episodes), his sharp-tongued and polyamorous sister Katy (Michelle Mylett), their shy and hapless best friend Daryl (Nathan Dale), and neighboring farmer Squirrelly Dan (Canadian stand-up comedian K. Trevor Wilson). Katy’s on-again, off-again boyfriends are the Hockey Players, Jonesy (Andrew Herr) and Reilly (Dylan Playfair), a pair of big-city jocks assigned to the town of Letterkenny’s perennially awful junior-league team. The Skids are a basement-dwelling gang of directionless goths led by the self-important Stewart (Tyler Johnston) who play video games, breakdance in parking lots, and deal meth on the side. And the Natives, led by Tanis (Kaniehtiio Horn), are a group of First Nations people who engage in various schemes, legal and otherwise, and have a fearsome reputation in town. Various townies also play their parts, including rival farmer and blowhard McMurray (Dan Petronijevic), perpetually on-the-make bartender Gail (Lisa Codrington), and Pastor Glen, a gay minister and waiter at seemingly every restaurant in town (Jacob Tierney, who directs much of the show and lends it a distinct visual style.)
Not much happens on Letterkenny in terms of plot, and that’s part of its charm. The show is expert at capturing the rhythms and patters of small-town living: chores need doing, little rivalries grow out of overfamiliarity, there’s plenty of drinking, and occasionally a fight breaks out, more out of boredom than any kind of actual disagreement or dislike. Attitudes and activities are closely tied to the weather (a fact reflected in the show presenting one bonus episode every season based on a major holiday), and people are fiercely defensive of the town and its history. The writers recognize that rural folks are lacking more in opportunity than intelligence, so grand schemes are always being hatched but quickly abandoned, and cleverness is more a matter of keeping yourself amused than actually changing your lot in life. Even when major life events take place (romances, harvests, moves, and the ever-changing fortunes of the Letterkenny Irish hockey team), they more often than not take place off-camera or between seasons, refusing to draw out or stretch the plot lines to add an artificial sense of urgency.
Indeed, that’s one of the great pleasures of the show: it’s easy to binge-watch in an era when many streaming services make the modern mode of viewing a chore. Each season of Letterkenny (it’s just finished its sixth, with three more to come) is only six episodes long, which makes it possible to knock out over a long weekend, but has enough satisfying threads to keep you interested without getting burdened down with a lot of continuity or serial nonsense. The main characters are plenty of fun and likable — it often plays like a rusticated It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the protagonists are decent instead of horrible), and become more complex as the show progresses (Wayne could easily be a lunkheaded reactionary stereotypical brawler, but he’s given the much more rare and necessary role of a traditionalist who isn’t a cranky throwback), and as short as the seasons are, they allow plenty of breathing room to develop the secondary players.
For all of its championing of rural virtues — the agricultural hall is for agricultural music! — it’s surprisingly progressive; while deviants (or “degens”, in the delightful and only sporadically incomprehensible country-Canadian argot of the show) are looked askance at, anyone who is seen as prejudiced or backwards is considered even worse, and an episode where Jay Baruchel shows up as “Hard Right Jay”, an out-of-towner trying to recruit the locals with a bunch of eerily familiar Proud Boy rhetoric, provides us with not only a satisfying beatdown, but one of the more courageous confrontations of creeping authoritarianism I’ve seen on any recent television show, sitcom or otherwise.
Of course, it is a comedy, and so ultimately, we have to judge it on whether or not it’s funny. Luckily, oh boy, is it. It throws a little bit of everything into the mix, from character and situational comedy to mild absurdism to the comedy of humiliation to pure slapstick, and manages to make it all fit within a narrow frame. It has a great time with its use of Canadian vernacular, though rarely to the point that it’s impenetrable to audiences south of the border, and its characters are clearly obsessed with American culture no matter how much they denigrate it (as in a hilarious bit where the Hicks go off on the culture of “El Lay”). It’s very much in love with puns and wordplay, which might turn some viewers off, especially as they tend to rely on it a lot more heavily as the seasons progress, but it’s done with the same warmth and heart as everything else on the show, even when it gets really raunchy, that it’s hard to dislike. And while it’s true that the rhythms of the humor become familiar and almost predictable over time, that’s just another reflection of the way life and time are measured outside of the cities.
Letterkenny isn’t the most audacious comedy on television right now; it’s as simple and satisfying as a home-cooked meal. But it’s still capable of shock, surprise, and the kind of friendly hang-out sensibility that you rarely see on sitcoms anymore. And if you’re craving good dog content — and who isn’t? — you’re going to love it. Give it a try; it’s not too bad.