Jared Keeso, right, in Shoresy.Crave
All uneven season long, Shoresy’s Canadian viewers have been asking themselves: Is Jared Keeso – star and creator of the hockey comedy about a chirper turned coach – really saying what he seems to be saying with his show’s latest plot line?
There certainly seemed to be a message behind a fawning, defensive Wayne Gretzky cameo – not to mention the repeated strident assertions, within the world of the show, that there is a “North American” culture, one not aligned with that of “Europeans.”
It was only fair to wait for the conclusion to draw conclusions.
Well, Shoresy’s season finale, streaming as of Jan. 22 on Crave, ends with a clearly symbolic shot: Canadian and American flags wave over an outdoor rink as hockey players from both sides of the border bask in brotherhood. They have just played a bloody game against Europeans and emerged with their shared and distinct concept of honour intact. (That moral code? Diving, bad; slashing, good.)
It cements the impression that what we’ve been watching has been a political allegory, one championing the idea of an interconnected North American culture.
But has Keeso been channelling nostalgia for something we’re losing to the current U.S.-Canada friction? Or has he, in between yo-mama jokes and slo-mo stripteases, been suggesting that Canucks should stick with the Yanks, and certainly side with them over the Europeans, no matter what the American chirper-in-chief says about us or anybody else?
The fictional world of Shoresy has remained a place where Canadians and Americans can still work – and play dirty – together to achieve common goals. In Keeso’s snow-covered, fairytale-with-fentanyl Sudbury, there has not been a “rupture in the world order,” as Prime Minister Mark Carney put it earlier this week at Davos, Switzerland.
Nothing about Shoresy’s use of hockey as a metaphor for geopolitics this season has been subtle: A team literally called the EU is touring the U.S. and Canada, destroying opponents with a style of play that combined finesse and speed with physicality.
“The North American game is dying,” Keeso’s Shoresy said, mournfully, in an early episode, describing its essence as being “size and grit.”
When the character shows up to coach the Blueberry Bulldogs, he discovers that the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization (the NOSHO) has collapsed. Eventually, he has the idea of forming a NOSHO North Stars team to play a one-off game against the EU.
The Canadian and American players wear jerseys with a map of North America: a maple leaf on the Canadian parts, stars and stripes on the American ones. The design was like a prescient riposte to the picture U.S. President Donald Trump posted on social media this week of a similar map with the American flag all over Canada.
What didn’t ring right, however, was that Shoresy’s guys are playing for the honour of North America ... and for Gretzky.
“I told Wayne we’d give him something to watch,” Shoresy tells his troops in the lead up to the big game. None of his players object.
Keeso, left, in Shoresy.Crave
The title character’s in-your-face idolization of Gretzky each episode – which turned off some fans on the show’s Reddit – has been puzzling.
It doesn’t really align with our previous sense of Shoresy, a character so patriotic he cries during O Canada. And the Great One’s style of play – speed and finesse defined – doesn’t really function as a contrast to the European style portrayed in the show.
Shoresy could have engaged with the actual critique of Gretzky – sparked by his consorting with an American president who has been attacking Canadian sovereignty – and still backed him up.
Instead, Keeso invented a different reason for a couple of side characters to dislike the hockey hero: He didn’t show up for a TV interview. This felt phony and cowardly – the narrative equivalent of a dive.
The season finale culminates in a speech by Nat (Tasya Teles), owner of the Blueberry Bulldogs. Here, Keeso more courageously throws some punches into his writing.
Nat delivers it to a couple of Presbyterian ladies who allowed the NOSHO North Stars to use their church’s rink after receiving promises of a peaceful game with the EU. Instead, it’s a bloodbath.
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The two make tsk-tsking comments about hockey’s “culture problem.”
Nat leaps to the defence, ostensibly, of the sport.
“Some guys play like psychos, but away from the game my guys are family men who call their parents and cry when they talk about their siblings,” she says.
“But they can also be who you saw at the rinks yesterday: killers. And the world needs people like that.”
She concludes that “the culture of hockey is just fine.”
I’m sure many of Shoresy’s fans will cheer. But how will they feel about the shot of American and Canadian flags that comes as a chaser?
On Tuesday, Carney told listeners in Davos that we shouldn’t mourn the old order and that “nostalgia isn’t a strategy.”
But culture – our popular hockey TV shows in particular; and this one has a big following in the U.S. on Hulu, too – is an appropriate place for Canadians to wrestle with our conflicted feelings and remember the days when popping across the border for a hockey game, or to fill the tank up with gas, was not a fraught experience.
The issue with this season of Shoresy isn’t its nostalgia, but its concussed view of the present.