TL;DR – This is a delightful insight into a part of Canadian life.

Disclosure – I watched these episodes on SBS.

Letterkenny Review –

As Christmas Day approaches (or if you are outside of Canada, you will get it on Boxing Day), it means that a Canadian institution is drawing to a close. It’s a show I discovered once by seeing a GIF on Imgur about kids falling off bikes, which is an odd entry point into a deeply amusing series. We have explored Letterkenny previously, but before we dived into the final season later this week, I thought it would be an excellent time to examine just what makes Letterkenny work as well as it does.

So to set the scene, welcome to Letterkenny, a town of 5,000 in rural Canada, and these are their problems. In this small town, we have several distinct groups. The Jocks, which given this is Canada, are the Hockey Bros Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr). Who is into getting Ws, takedowns, snipes, and billet sisters. You have the Skids, led by Stewart (Tyler Johnston) and Roald (Evan Stern), who spend most of their time in their parent’s basement consuming illicit material and playing video games. Then there are the Christians with pastor Glen (Jacob Tierney) and his complicated relationship with who he is, oh and the local Mennonites Noah (Jonathan Torrens) and Anita Dyck (Sarah Wayne Callies). The Natives from the local reservation are led by the infamous and illusive Aunty Tanis (Tiio Horn), who oscillates between an ally and an enemy. But of course, no discussion about Letterkenny can be made without the contribution of The Hicks, Wayne (Jared Keeso), Katy (Michelle Mylett), Daryl (Nathan Dales), Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), and of course, the McMurray’s (Dan Petronijevic & Melanie Scrofano), and Gail (Lisa Codrington) who runs the bar. They are the heart of the town and also, sometimes, its fists.

There is a lot that can be said about Letterkenny. Indeed, its central premise is to both champion small-town rural people who tend to get overlooked while also working to shift the stereotypes about them. They might be good old boys with rigid social structures, but they are also able to grow and care for each other. If there is one theme that cuts through all eleven seasons so far, it is that of community. There is an interesting divide between the internal and the external. We get to make fun of our own, but if an outsider makes fun of someone in the town, then everyone rallies against them. The perfect example of this is in the first season, where members of The Res cause trouble in the town due to the actions of The Skids. But even though no one in the two really likes The Skids at this point in the show, they will rally behind them.

But that notion of community shifts and changes throughout the show. The Res might be the antagonists in Season One. Still, by working together, the idea of community expands, with everyone backing each other up when, say, the Degens (degenerates) from up-country cause trouble. The fact that this notion of community is not static makes the show able to grow and change without altering the core of what makes the show work. This is how we get the exploration further out of the province to Québec and even something referred to when I check my notes as “the Maritimes”? But also the addition of characters in the show like Ron (James Daly) and Dax (Gregory Waters).

This also extends to the characters themselves. McMurray starts the show as this sort of bumbling figure who is primarily notable for interrupting people when they begin to talk. But you add in Mrs. McMurray and decide that they are swingers, and all of a sudden, everything about the characters shifts and changes. Reilly and Jonesy go from slackers coasting through their lives as hockey players to award-winning coaches, and you feel that journey works. Indeed, even our central character has shifted and changed through the show. In some ways, Wayne remains the rock the rest of the town hangs off, but he has also softened and explored some of his own insecurities that held him back at the start of the show.  

There is probably a whole discussion that you could have about the expression of gender in this show, especially around the use of violence to solve problems. However, I am not going to pull that apart here in detail. However, if there is one thing that I will explore is how violence is used in this world. In most cases, the people entering into the violence have done so voluntarily within the system they collectively agree to. When it is a non-voluntary smackdown, (nearly) all of the people getting hit were bullies picking on people. This makes the violence almost sympathetic, and I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing.

However, the other main component of every fight is the pageantry that goes around it, the pageantry that extends from the in-universe to the production. Every fight starts with the same ritual, where the unbuttoning of Wayne’s shirt sleeve becomes the queue to the audience that something is about to go down. The fights themselves are fine, and they get better as the show progresses while also decreasing in number. One of the critical external additions to this pageantry that they add to every fight scene is the use of a needle drop, which is the only audio you hear. Sometimes this can be La Rondine: Dorerra’s Dream performed by Ľuba Orgonášová playing over the Hard Right getting a beatdown or Fuck the Pain Away by the Peaches playing over a bunch of citidiots getting a called to task (not) at a wedding. Or something in between or completely different as we explore the whole gamut of musical genres in the show.

Quite often, they feature local Canadian artists, giving them a platform for their music to spread across the world. If I had to pick my favourite musical moment for the show, and this was hard, it would likely be the gang coming together to take down Dierks (Tyler Hynes), who cheated on Katy. The enter build-up to the inciting event (which we never see) is all set to M83’s Do It, Try It. The power of that hit just as everyone jumped out of their trucks and ran up the driveway, gave the moment the perfect musical energy. Fun fact: when you watch this, you can see Wayne wreck the truck’s number plate with his boot.     

While we have talked about the central premise and the pageantry, the last thing that I want to talk about is the dialogue. For people outside of Canada, the first thing you see is sometimes an impenetrable wall of slang and abbreviations that some you can understand from context clues, but others are more difficult. ‘Having a Spit’ means throwing up, okay, that’s fine, but it took me many seasons to work out that ‘Ferda’ is a smooshing of ‘For the Boys’ It goes by so quickly that you miss the context other than it being a general affirmation. Eleven seasons in, I can now follow just about everything they say, but fair being fair, the episode May 2-4 clearly showed that as an Australian, I don’t have a moral high ground here.

Letterkenny is a very dialogue-dependent show, with some conversations being rapid-fire exchanges, some being musical battles, and others being Brechtian conversations with the audience that can involve the entire cast. Some of these conversations are so wild that I am shocked that they could get the whole thing in the can without people constantly breaking. The whole Roberta Bondar conversation is a peak example of this. Often, each of these conversations is framed in a completely unnatural way, but instead of ripping you out of the show, these moments heighten the more surreal aspects that make the show work.   

It is also a show where very little is off the table. It can be exploring philosophy or history in one breath. In the next, we can go through the fundamentally graphic different names that the McMurrys use for trips when they go away to Cancun or other similar locations. I hope they did have a pressure washer. While this can be confronting at times, it is also where the show finds a lot of its humour because those tonal shifts pull you along in their wake, and the show knows how to stick a landing. This could be conversations with the local Mennonite family called The Dyck’s or, picking which is the best potato chip or confronting deep fears like getting a prostate test. You never know just where the show will go, and it is better for that.

In the end, do we recommend Letterkenny? Well, yes, but with an asterisk. The first is that a lot of the language and content is going to push people away, and that is fair. Also, just power through Fartbook. It gets better from there. More so, if you want an incite into a very particular part of Canadian life while laughing so much that you have tears running down your cheeks and your face is red because you don’t want to wake up your neighbours. Well, this is the show for you.    

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen Letterkenny yet ?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Letterkenny
Directed by – Jacob Tierney & others
Written by – Jared Keeso, Jacob Tierney & others
Created by – Jared Keeso
Developed by – Jared Keeso & Jacob Tierney
Production/Distribution Companies – New Metric Media, Crave, Hulu & SBS
Starring – Jared Keeso, Nathan Dales, Michelle Mylett, K. Trevor Wilson, Dylan Playfair, Andrew Herr, Tyler Johnston, Evan Stern, Daniel Petronijevic, Melanie Scrofano, Jacob Tierney, Lisa Codrington, Kaniehtiio Horn, Mark Forward, Clark Backo, James Daly, Gregory Waters & Kamilla Kowal With Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, Tyler Hynes, Joël Roger Gagné, Jay Bertin, Alex McCooeye, Kim Cloutier, Jess Salgueiro, Sash Striga, Nadine Bhabha, Jonathan Torrens & Sarah Wayne Callies And Alexander De Jordy, Sarah Gadon, Bradley Trudeau, Thomas-Dylan Cook, Ellyn Jade, Brooker Muir, Joseph Nakogee, Cara Gee, Daniel VanZandwyck, Patrick McNeil, Jeff McEnery, Kalinka Petrie, Alex Spencer, Sébastien Huberdeau, Alexandre Landry, Domenic Di Rosa, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Stephen Huszar, Andrew Hinkson, Jordan Johnson-Hinds, Boomer Phillips, Jared Keeso, Jared Abrahamson,  Lily Gao, Ian Ronningen, Kelly McCormack, Jay Baruchel, Cora Eckert, Brooke Bruce, Olivia Colilli, Lauren Burch, Julia Burch, Vanessa Matsui, Daniel Harroch, Nazneen Contractor & Elise Bauman