One of the best shows airing right now, an emotionally satisfying, uplifting, and singular merging of sports drama and comedy, opens its fifth season with nearly four minutes of best friends arguing about masturbation etiquette.
It's a masterpiece.
This is Shoresy, spinoff of the hit Canadian comedy series Letterkenny, and even speaking as a Letterkenny fan, if you'd told me four years ago when it premiered that it would reach masterpiece status I wouldn't have believed you. Hell, I probably wouldn't have believed you if you said it would last more than two or three seasons. But here we are, with five seasons of something magical, hilarious, and constantly skating that razor thin line between absurd and profound. It's the best sports comedy of its era. It's better than Ted Lasso, and I'm tired of not talking about it.
So let's talk about it. But first, as Shoresy himself would say, it's time to set the tone.
Shoresy follows the exploits of the title hockey player, who first emerged on Letterkenny as a minor gag character whose only traits were reliable smack talk and bragging about sleeping with other hockey players' moms. To make Shoresy (played by Letterkenny creator Jared Keeso) even more obscure and odd, you never saw his face. He was just a voice and the back of a head, constantly chirping at Letterkenny's other hockey characters for our amusement. The idea that he could carry a series seemed laughable, but if anyone could spin comedy gold out of something like that, it was Keeso. As Letterkenny's star, creator, and lead writer, he's proven adept at spinning just about anything into a deeply watchable hangout show at the very least.
As Shoresy began back in 2022, that seemed like exactly what we'd get. The series followed Shoresy as he worked to rebuild his own "Senior Whaleshit Hockey" (amateur hockey leagues in Canada not unlike minor league baseball in the US) squad in Sudbury, Ontario, by bringing in new players and trying to build a winning culture. When we meet him, Shoresy's reputation is for being a dirtbag on and off the court, constantly chirping, fighting, getting in trouble, and never tying himself down. The first season shows us his effort to commit fully to something for once in his life, and how that changes things for him.
Flash forward a few years, and Shoresy's days as a player are over. Repeated injuries finally forced his retirement, but not before taking his team – the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs – to heights previously unheard of in his small town. He's found love, he's found brotherhood with his players and sisterhood with the team owner, Nat (Tasya Teles), and her assistant managers, and he's got his sights set on something new: Proving to a hotshot team of European pros that North American hockey players still have the grit that so defined the game on this side of the pond.
Now, why did I bring up Ted Lasso in the headline of this piece, and in the introductory paragraphs? Because Ted Lasso is the most recognizable and frequently acclaimed sports comedy series of the 21st century, for starters, but also because there's a certain shared DNA in how these two shows work. They're both about obscure characters elevated to title roles, they're both about underdogs trying to prove they're worth more than anyone believes, and they're both about the initially prickly but ultimately rewarding relationship between team leader and team owner. They're also thematically linked as stories about how sports and the camaraderie there in can redeem us and uplift us, and how a life well-lived can often be the best support system for athletic achievement.
But of course, one is a multi-Emmy-winning phenomenon, and the other is a semi-obscure spinoff that's earned acclaim and devoted fans, but never risen to make the same cultural impact. Now, I love Ted Lasso. Like so many people, I found it to be a remarkable liferaft in the dark times of early COVID lockdowns, and it's a show I still enjoy very much. I would not have expected, when Shoresy first arrived, that Keeso's series would top Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudeikis' soccer tour-de-force, but it's done it, and it's done it by giving audiences everything Ted Lasso offered, but in a more complex, intimate way. It's a show about fighters, how far they'll go, and what they'll learn along the way that makes them pull back, take stock, and grow.
The athletes of Shoresy are not rich. Shoresy lives with three roommates and fellow hockey players, all of them second chancers who didn't make it in the NHL and now hope to prove themselves in the senior leagues. They have no illusions about what they do, no chance of somehow being elevated to multi-million-dollar superstardom, and they're not out to reinvent the game. What they're out to do is to find, hopefully in each other, reasons to keep going, because while they love beer and women and nights hanging out under the lights of a club or on the living room couch, they love hockey more.
Keeso also clearly loves hockey, as evidenced by the show's commitment to realism on the rink, using real hockey players in the cast, and of course, focusing on the balletic power of the game through a number of expertly paced almost silent sequences set to pulsing music. A Shoresy episode usually only runs about 22 minutes, and you'd be surprised how much of it is dialogue-free, devoting space to let visuals tell the story whether the boys are on the ice or trying to get with some girls at the club. There's beauty in both of these things, and Shoresy does not draw lines between them.
That same sense of everything bleeding together to make one satisfying slice of life extends to the show's character focus. Shoresy does not enter the show as a lovable motivator-in-chief. He enters the show as a frustrated, aging skater who makes extra money refereeing high school games (and making fun of high school players) on the side. It's not a career, it's a calling, and Shoresy's pissed off that it's not working out anymore. He has two choices: Adapt or die. Shoresy is about making that choice not just once, but again and again. You got the team together, now what do you do with all of those wins? You can't play anymore, so where do you put all that energy and love? You found a way to be a teacher as well as a player, so what's the right lesson?
With its fifth season, which just dropped in the States on Hulu, Shoresy asks these questions on the grandest scale yet, and it does it all in between debates on masturbation, long stretches of dialogue that are just about pronouncing funny names, and Shoresy finally zeroing in on the woman who could be his partner for the rest of his life. It's a remarkable arc for a character who started as an elaborate series of "Your Mom" jokes, and it's made all the more remarkable by the ensemble nature of the piece. Every part of Shoresy is geared toward making you laugh as much as possible, and yet the show is capable of emotional maneuvers so completely engrossing that I have literally wept while watching it. There is simply nothing else like it on TV, and if you love Ted Lasso (or Heated Rivalry, the megahit hockey show from Letterkenny's other chief creative force, Jacob Tierney), you owe it yourself to give this show the love it deserves. It'll give it back tenfold.
Five seasons of Shoresy are now streaming on Hulu. Go 'til you can't go no more.
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