Letterkenny spinoff Shoresy puts chippy character at centre ice (2024)

You don’t have to be a Letterkenny devotee to enjoy the new spinoff series Shoresy. You should, however, be OK with blunt, blue comedy that comes at you like a Brock Boeser wrist shot.

A six-part half-hour spinoff of the Crave hit Letterkenny, Shoresy follows the chirpy, foul-mouthed and sensitive — cries during O Canada — Shoresy (Jared Keeso) to Sudbury, Ont., and the senior AAA hockey team the Bulldogs.

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Again, for those non-Letterkenny types, Shoresy is a dip-using dirty player, with a dirty mouth, a suspect sex life and a locker-room toilet ritual that is way more cringey than Guy Lafleur’s penchant for between-period smokes.

Created and written by Keeso, Shoresy is a kind of Slap Shot meets a workplace comedy that comes with the usual serving of camaraderie, competition and a quest for success. In this case, success is being the best in a four-team league and getting “bums in seats.”

Packed full of characters, Shoresy, which is airing on Hulu in the U.S., is a comedy that doesn’t wait for viewers to catch-up. The pace of the writing speeds along like Pavel Bure breaking to the net. Keeso, who also created and starred in Letterkenny, leaves no time to be offended.

Expletive-packed exchanges like the ones Shoresy has with a pair of teen hockey players (Bourke Cazabon and Keegan Long) can be so offside that it’s icing, but quickly those spit-take-inducing shockers are balanced out by smart takes on small towns, team dynamics and business.

And any thought that our hero has a myopic view of the world is hilariously counterbalanced by a run of musical theatre references that even manages to use the 525,600-minutes line from the Rent song Seasons of Love as a time reference.

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Thank goodness for the rewind button on the remote.

“Jared took risks in his writing and he created a world that has heart but also gives room to people to play and poke fun at each other,” said Tasya Teles, who plays Nat, the owner of the Bulldogs. “The world has gone through such crazy shifts and so this is just such a beautiful way of kind of harmonizing, bringing everyone together.”

While Shoresy is the chirper-in-chief, it’s open season on getting verbally hacked. No one person is picked on and no one person is safe. Often facing off against Shoresy is a triumvirate of the kind of fierce females that would make Shakespeare and the Spice Girls proud.

Leading the trio like a mob boss with an MBA is Nat. Nat is flanked, literally, by Ojibwe sisters Ziigwan (Blair Lamora) and Miigwan (Keilani Elizabeth Rose). All three of these actors call Vancouver home.

“It was a treat. I don’t get to play around with comedy too much and this was the first dive into that world for me,” said Rose, whose Indigenous lineage is a combination of Lheidli T’enneh (from Prince George) and Kanaka Mamao (Native Hawaiian). “At first I was literally, ‘Wait, what is an aqua dump?’ I think it’s brilliant, so funny.”

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Nat’s constant refrain is “bums in seats.” That means not only money in the bank, but it also means something bigger and better — community connection. After all, everyone knows hockey brings people together.

“It’s great seeing a community coming together fighting for the underdog and watching a group of women at the forefront of that,” said Rose.

The girl-power dynamic continues from the Bulldogs’ front office up the league ladder to an all-female-run Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization (NOSHO, get it).

Sisters Miig and Ziig are loyal to Nat but have very different outlooks. Miig plays it cool while Ziig is always ready to kick it up a notch.

“It catches you off-guard,” said Lamora about her character’s trigger-happy tongue.

Lamora, who shares Ojibwe lineage with her character, has a favourite R-rated Ziig zinger that’s not exactly suitable for print.

As mentioned before, this show has a palpable pressing rhythm. It moves at a clip that demands engaged performances.

“It’s cool,” said Rose about the show’s speedy style. “It’s a dance and it’s kind of like a game too. It feels like we are passing the puck to each other. Because of the way Jared writes it there are a couple of different setups and then the punch. So, we are literally passing the puck to each other, back-and-forth in the scene, and then we go for the goal.”

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Rehearsal was a big part of the process during the two-month shoot in Sudbury last winter because, as Teles explained, they often shot 20 pages of dialogue in one day.

“It was an amazing marathon for actors. It feels kind of theatrical in a way. You get to really lean on the language. I love that so much about the writing,” said Teles, who is also the restaurateur behind Parlour Restaurants in Vancouver and Toronto, and is currently working on a standup comedy career. “You have to be on top of it. You can’t fumble the ball. There was a lot of preparation.”

Shoresy has been a hit right out of the box. It topped Crave viewership and it has over 90 per cent audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes.

“It felt like a little tiny intimate project when we did it and now that it has been released to the world it’s so funny, I have people from Norway messaging me on Instagram,” said Lamora, who recently wrapped-up on the film Café Daughter. “It’s really cool to see the reach and how it is sitting with people.

“I feel a lot of people are connecting to it because of the hockey or the community aspect. Just being a part of something is what a lot of people are loving about it, which makes me really happy because it felt like a little family homegrown thing when we did it. I’m happy it’s translating.”

Rose, who is currently developing feature projects about groundbreaking prima ballerina Maria Tall Chief and Queen Lili’uokalani, the first queen and last monarch of Hawaii, is also thrilled with the feedback, noting she was recently recognized while shopping in a market in Kona, Hawaii.

“It’s not just in Canada. It’s really cool,” said Rose. “I think Americans are getting a lesson in Canadian lingo.”

Well, Canadian hockey lingo anyway.

dgee@postmedia.com

twitter.com/dana_gee

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