Six years after its finale, Schitt's Creek is still finding new viewers, a sign the comedy about the Rose family’s collapse and restart in a small town has not lost its pull. Eugene Levy’s Johnny Rose, Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose, Dan Levy’s David Rose and Annie Murphy’s Alexis Rose remain at the center of a series that keeps reaching people who missed it the first time around.
The draw starts with the people who made it. Eugene Levy and the late Catherine O’Hara first knew each other in the 1970s, then worked together on Second City Television before pairing again on Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman. In Schitt's Creek, that long partnership gave the show a family dynamic that felt lived in from the start, even as the Roses are stripped of their wealth after someone they trust tampers with their financial books and the FBI takes away everything they have.
The series then sends the family into the Rosebud Motel, where Johnny had once bought Schitt's Creek as a joke and where they are forced to share a suite. Alexis takes a job as a receptionist at the local vet, while Stevie Budd stays behind the desk as the motel’s deadpan clerk. The town around them includes Roland Schitt, Jocelyn Schitt and Stevie, and the show never rushes to make the main family likable, which is part of why it lasts.
That refusal to smooth the edges is the reason the show still lands. The Roses begin as socially out-of-place, often unbearable people, and the comedy comes from watching them collide with a town that does not bend to them. Six years on, Schitt's Creek is still being discovered because it lets the characters earn their way into sympathy instead of handing it to them on day one.