Jared Keeso and Brad Bonello appear in a scene from Shoresy season 3.Lindsay Sarazin/Supplied
For his next act, can Shoresy save Canada?
The crude, chirping hockey hooligan alter-ego of series creator and star Jared Keeso is – spoiler alerts ahead – looking for a new reason to live beyond playing for the Sudbury Blueberry-Bulldogs, as the third season of the language-drunk Crave hockey comedy concludes this week.
Could politics be the next chapter for the 40-something enforcer, now that he’s finally been forced to hang up his skates in the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization (the NOSHO, per its apt acronym) after a couple of concussions?
“This is the end of Shoresy,” flashes a message on the screen briefly for a few second at the conclusion of the latest episode, streaming as of Friday.
My heart dropped like one of the Blueberry-Bulldog’s three Jims’ gloves for a moment – but, no, Shoresy is not following Letterkenny, the recently concluded Keeso comedy from which it was spun off, into that good night.
The “this is the end of Shoresy” message is quickly followed by “Part I” – and, indeed, a fourth season is about to start shooting in Sudbury, Ont.
Shoresy definitely deserves more life. It has been gaining steam from one vulgar and violent season to the next in what has amounted to one long storyline where Shoresy leads the nearly bankrupted Blueberry-Bulldogs on a record-breaking run of wins before, this season, being crowned champions at a national senior tournament after rooting out Les Rapides de Rawdon.
Not since Frasier (the original; not the revival) has a one-note side character from a sitcom been given him his own spinoff so successfully.
But Frasier Crane did little to unite American, or even Seattlers, while Shore – we don’t know his first name, only his nicknames – has created a comic cultural space as popular with those who loudly sing O Canada as those who deliver long land acknowledgments (and indeed with those of us who see no reason why you can’t do both).
Amid a fracturing political landscape, Keeso seems like the only guy who thinks that all the folks here in this country can all work together toward a common goal – where, in hockey parlance, everyone contributes.
That wasn’t necessarily the case with Letterkenny, where Canada was shown divided along all kinds of different and only occasionally intersecting tribal lines. That series was a picture of the postnation: the Hicks, the Jocks and the Skids; the Québecois, the Natives and the Mennonites.
On Shoresy, however, everyone comes together starting with Shoresy’s family, a large loving foster one that is a perhaps heavy-handed metaphor for that old ideal called multiculturalism. All sorts are represented among the hockey-head’s brothers and sisters, while the pater familias is Canada’s gay dad himself: Scott Thompson from The Kids in the Hall.
The whole clan lives in the great city of Sudbury, where English, French and Indigenous all mingle like in no other metropolis outside of what should be Canada’s capital city, Winnipeg.
Shoresy’s Sudbury is a kind of funhouse mirror of the fictional town that Levy père et fils created in Schitt’s Creek – a place where everyone gets along over a beer, but only after they’ve beaten each other up in a bar over whether the proper term is “runners up” or “runner ups.”
This is reflected in the Sudbury Blueberry-Bulldogs, too. First Nations members include coach Sanguinette – Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat, whose acting has stepped up with each season – and Ziigwan and Miigwan, the front-office staff played by Blair Lamora and Keilani Elizabeth Rose in what’s likewise become a polished profane double act.
The Bulldogs players include English-speaking Canadians of different dialects: Ex-hockey player Terry Ryan’s Hitch is a consistent comic standout with his marvellous Newfoundlandisms and stereotype-subverting corrections of Shoresy’s malapropisms.
French gets love too in Keeso’s scripts, with Jonathan-Ismaël Diaby, another genuine hockey player from Blainville acting as himself, speaking all his lines in a barely penetrable joual translated into English in the subtitles.
Sidebar: How strange is it that the CBC, our public broadcaster, regularly remakes Radio-Canada series from their French-language originals into English-language versions, while Bell Media, the private conglomerate behind Crave, is comfortable airing whole Shoresy scenes in French packed with references to anglo-obscure Québécois personalities? (Three cheers for Marie-Mai’s role as the owner of Le Rapides to Rawdon this season.)
Just another example of how the public institutions in this country, like so many of its politicians, seem interested in dividing and conquering more than trying to unite everyone.
It’s hard to entirely pin down the politics of Keeso’s show – which slyly incorporates information on treaties while simultaneously wooing the Don Cherry crowd with its respectful callbacks to “Never let them know you’re hurt” culture (even as it also takes concussions seriously).
The season finale suggests a few possible futures for Shoresy: running a hockey school for kids, becoming an analyst on Bro Dude Sports or coming back to coach the Sudbury Bulldogs.
But is it too much to ask Keeso to throw those ideas aside and have run him for Prime Minister?