Tuesday TV Touchbase: Big Mistakes and Schitt$ Creek

Today is Dan Levy Day here on the Tuesday TV Touchbase.

Dan is the son of Eugene Levy (SCTV, American Pie, etc) with whom he created Schitt$ Creek.

Schitt$ Creek follows the travails of the rich Rose family.

Well, formerly rich.  

It seems a business partner Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) relied on wasn't so reliable when it came to managing the Rose family's wealth, leaving them bereft of all their money and possessions.

Except one.

Back in 1991, Johnny bought his son David (Dan Levy) a small town in Canada called Schitt's Creek.  It was meant as a joke.

It's all the Rose family has left.

So Johnny, David, Johnny's wife Moira (Catherine O'Hara) and David's sister Alexis (Annie Murphy) set up shop in the small rural town, making their home in a couple of rooms in the town's run down motel.  

The Rose family runs into problems as their old life style of being rich runs into the obstacle of being poor as well as trying to make life work in an odd provincial town. 

I recently finished the first season of Schitt$ Creek which ends with Johnny finding a buyer for the town. The Rose family is ready to book it out of town ASAP but their efforts to say goodbye are premature when the fat boorish slob set to buy the town keels over dead from a heart attack before he can sign the paperwork.  

Despite Johnny's efforts to force a pen in the dead man's hand and scrawl a signature on the bottom line.

The fish out of water dynamic that forces the urbane city sophisticate Rose family to learn to cope with the quirks of their new found home fuels a lot of the comedy and the unexpected heart of the series.

My favorite relationship that develops is between David and Stevie, the sardonic motel clerk.  Stevie doesn't seem to have a lot that really holds her interest in Schitt's Creek and somehow, she has become David's only friend, not just in this town but perhaps in his whole life.

Steve is played by Emily Hampshire who set the lowest bar possible for a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy.  She's the standard I measure by for bad performances on that show.  A celebrity might have a bad night but I will observe they are not "Emily Hampshire levels of bad".  On Schitt$ Creek as Stevie, Emily is quite charming.   

Aftrer Schitt$ Creek ended, Annie Murphy would go on to play the beleagured wife Allison on Kevin Can Fuck Himself.

Sadly, Catherine O'Hara is no longer with us but her Moira Rose is an incredible capstone to her remarkable legacy as a comedian and actor.  

Dan Levy followed up Schitt$ Creek by creating another oddball comedy series called Big Mistakes.

Big Mistakes is a boiling cauldron of dysfunction.  

Dan Levy is Nicky, a minister who is gay but that's OK, the congregation knows that and are cool with it... as long as he doesn't do gay stuff.  Which is a source of stress as Nicky has a boyfriend and they are most assuredly doing gay stuff.

His sister Morgan is a school teacher by day and a total hot mess the rest of the time. She's trapped in a long term relationship with Max who is a petty, spoiled, passive agressive, selfish prick. 

Nicky and Morgan's mother Linda and their youngest sister Natalie always find someway to make Nicky and Morgan feel worse about their lives.  

The series opens with Linda's very elderly and very sick mother about to die right before her birthday which Linda insists on celebrating as she berates Nicky and Morgan for not making her mother's death easier on her.  

In the first of many "big mistakes", Morgan, looking for a gift for her dying grandma, shoplifts a presumably cheap necklace from a gift shop that is a front for a Turkish criminal cartel. The proprietor of the store tracks down Nicky and Morgan and demands the return of the necklace under threat of death.

Except Linda already put the necklace around grandma's neck right before she died and is now buried with it.  

Which leads to the first of Nicky and Morgan's crimes in service to the Turkish criminal cartel: grave robbing.  

I say "the first" as returning the necklace does not absolve Nicky and Morgan from their servitude to the Turkish criminal cartel.

As much as Nicky loathes these errands for the gang, Morgan is so deperate for some respite from her life with Max, she more sanguine about her role running odd jobs for the mob.  

Meanwhile, with her mother now dead, Linda takes on more stress by running for mayor of her town. While Natalie is devoted and doting on her mother, Linda still complains that Nicky and Morgan are not doing more to help her.   

Nicky's feeling pressure from his church and from his boyfriend while Morgan's useless whiny boyfriend has somehow cajoled her into an engagement. 

And all top of that, there's the continual threat of death at the hands of the Turkish criminal cartel.

The Turks keep employing the sibling duo in a series of bizarre errands. The Turks are looking to make an end run around the Italian mob to take over the drug trade from Bolivia by smuggling cocaine in cows. 

Nicky's continual stumbling out of grace from grave robbing to doing lines of coke at a Miami night club is like watching a car wreck in slow motion.  Nicky is in a state of constant astonishment at how far everything has spun out of control.

In case you're wondering how does a pastor know how to do lines of coke, Morgan shows him how.  Don't ask how a school teacher knows how to do line of coke. 

But perhaps the nightmare spiral can end when gunmen mow down the Turks and the Bolivians.  Are Nicky and Morgan finally out from under the thumb of the mob?

Returning home, Nicky and Morgan attend Linda's victory party after she wins the mayoral election.

But...

Why are so many people from the Italian mob at the party?

They were invited.  

And much to their growing alarm, Nicky and Morgan realize just how deeply and close to home the hooks of the mob are imbedded in their family.   

Props to Laurie Metcalf who goes full tilt into the role of Linda, a woman who cannot stop herself of from saying whatever she is thinking. Linda's professed love for her family is fractured by the frequent cruelty of her candor towards that family.  Even ever devoted youngest daughter Natalie isn't spared.  

And Dan Levy crafts a compelling character in Nicky who struggles with his faith, his identity and his morals even has he descends deeper down the hole into a criminal enterprise he never wanted. 

Unlike the more whimsical charms of Schitt$ Creek,  Big Mistakes is a much darker, more disturbing show.  Both shows trafffic in humor derived from social awkwardness.  But the worst that can happen on Schitt$ Creek is embarrassment.

On Big Mistakes, the stakes are more grim and dangerous. And the season ends with Nicky and Morgan in an inextractable mess.  

I have no idea how or even if season 2 can get them out of it.  

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I need to take a moment and acknowledge the passing of Randolph Mantooth at age 80.  He had a long and prolific career as a TV and movie actor that spanned 5 decades.  But I knew him best as John Gage on the TV series Emergency!

Emergency! was part of the stable of shows produced by Jack Webb that included Dragnet and Adam-12.

Both Andrea and I watched this show when we were kids and around the late 1990's, I think, Nick@Nite began running Emergency! reruns one summer and damned if we didn't follow those reruns every evening.  

Randolph Mantooth played John Gage, one of a pair of paramedics for a then nascent emergency medical unit operating out of Fire Station 51.  The program faced resistance from hospitals who were not comfortable with firefighters handing medical stuff and firefighter who questioned why some of their own were doing anything other than fighting fires.

Squad 51 driven by Gage and DeSoto.

John Gage and his partner Roy DeSoto (played by Kevin Tighe) do their best to prove the paramedic program is a good idea. Mantooth and Tighe took real paramedic classes to add some realism to their performances.  But Mantooth once admited that despite that training, "if anyone has a heart attack, I'll call 911 with the best of them."

Even after Emergency! ended and he  went on to other acting roles, Randolph Mantooth remained a tireless advocate for firefighters and EMS workers.

God bless, Mr. Mantooth and may you rest in peace. 

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And that is that for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase.

Coming up on the Touchbase: The Vampire Lestat wraps up the season.  

And Andre and I will be bringing in Spider Noir for a landing.

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.   

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