Letterkenny
I found out about Letterkenny from one of the many facebook/reddit Always Sunny in Philadelphia pages I lurk on. Someone asked if anyone else had ever considered a cross-over episode between the shows. I took this to mean they were very similar and their worlds and styles would mesh easily. After bingeing 5 seasons I realise such an undertaking would be impossible to achieve and dangerous to try. Still I came away with a new show - Letterkenny.
Letterkenny is about the town tiny town of the same name, population 5000. It follows different crews and solo characters as they interact with one another - sometimes motivated on a quest, sometimes just pitching jokes from the sidelines. The main characters are the hicks - a group of three fast-talking, stern and biscuits-and-gravy home cooked countryfolk and the sexually promiscuous sister of one, Katy (Michelle Mylett).
The action of every episode begins with a small vignette usually involving these four. Their interactions are a flurry of fast paced, clipped lines delivered in a noire Humphery Bogart flick manner - but their content is a grab bag of popular culture references chosen less for relevance than they fit the pacing and the rhyming. You get a sense that here is some rural ingenuity at work - customising the parts at hand so they fit - rather than ordering away for expensive stock.
These intro sections are clever but sometimes a little self-indulgent and self aware for the Australian palette. But they do prepare the viewer to be alert - to pay attention to the lines and callbacks because you can blink and miss them.
After the intro the show is allowed to return to the proper business of allowing the towns crews interact. The fascinating thing about Letterkenny is that each crew has their own well defined style and it’s watching these styles collide, coalesce and sometimes struggle to comprehend each other that is the genius of the show.
There the skids - a crew of cybergoth burnouts that cook up drugs - their style is burlesque. There’s the outrageously camp Darryl who taps into small town chapel hypocritical evangelism. There’s the semi-comprehensible double act brahs Reilley and Jonsey - they speak frat boys sports scholarship winners. There is native Indians on the reservation - that operate like LA cholos. There is the sexually uberaggressive Gail who just talks in double ententes while thrusting manically. So many over the top characters and styles can only work because the hicks at the centre of it all are restrained to the point of dour.
In this way Letterkenny relies heavily on form - pop culture references and very snappy lines. I did laugh but definitely spent more time marvelling at the clash of styles than punchlines which take a good deal of cognitive load for an Australian ear just to decode.
Letterkenny will always be compared to that other Canadian cult classic Trailer Park Boys. It is less funny but just as anarchic only in a different way. Well worth the watch if only to see a sitcom that is more formally experimental than anything else out there.