SHORESY!

A show that brings lumber and love, plus Links of the Week: a high-school reunion, a charming movie, and the aged/ageless Joni Mitchell

Jul 29, 2022

You will love him, and also want to slap him

Last Sunday I binged all six episodes of SHORESY on Hulu. I would have watched 600. It made me wish I were in a hockey league, so I could commit horrendous slashing penalties within seconds of sobbing through the national anthem.

This will make sense if you watch it. You should watch it. It’s the most sheer fun I’ve had watching TV in a long, long time.

IMMEDIATE AND SINCERE WARNING: If you are offended by profanity, or put off by crude jokes, disregard the previous paragraphs. There are many other options out there for your viewing enjoyment. You are unlikely to enjoy extended sequences of Shoresy (Jared Keeso) roasting various teenagers’ skin problems, and talking unbelievable trash about their moms, in his part-time job as a high school hockey ref.

If you clicked that last link, and laughed, proceed.

Shoresy—I don’t think we ever learn his first name—is the dirtiest hockey player in Canada and the most annoying. His voice has the pitch of a leaf blower, and often the volume. He chirps at opponents and coaches and teammates and the team owner and various barmaids and his best friends. He has landed on the worst team in a senior league in northern Ontario. After their 20th loss of the season, the owner says she’s folding the team. Shoresy, in response, vows the team will never lose again.

He recruits some ringers with talent but various personality and/or legal issues. He brings in three brawling brothers all named Jim (any resemblance to the Hanson brothers in SLAP SHOT surely intended). He does some assistant coaching from the locker-room toilet in between periods. Things start to happen.

What you might not expect are the layers. Shoresy weeps every time “O Canada” is played before the games. He is smitten with the local paper’s beat writer and tries to woo her with promises of assorted tempura and foot rubs.

All the real authority figures in SHORESY are women: the reporter, the team owner, her assistants, the league executives. Several of the characters—and cast members—are indigenous, including Sanguinet (Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat), a quiet charmer who starts out as the team’s worst player and ends up the coach. There is much discussion of a lake party where he received a “squeezer,” which—well, if you heeded the warning five paragraphs ago, you don’t want to know.

The thing that really struck me was how much SHORESY resembles a screwball comedy from the ‘30s, one where the characters bat dialog back and forth with exquisite timing. My favorite scenes are with Shoresy and Nat (the team owner, played by Tasya Teles):

“I’m crestfallen” kills me every time.

It’s really hard to do comedy with heart. Movies like WEDDING CRASHERS and BRIDESMAIDS have funny parts and heartfelt parts, but they never quite mesh—they feel like two movies grafted together. About the only thing recently that gets the mix right is TED LASSO. SHORESY is not quite as good as TED LASSO, but it’s got the laughs and the heart all mixed together in much the same way.

Drumsticks for everybody! (Watch the show, you’ll get it.)

10 things I wanted to share this week:

My weekly for WFAE was about the wheels coming off Charlotte’s bus system.
Charles McNair had a really thoughtful piece in Salvation South about the 50th reunion of his high-school class, part of Alabama’s first integrated schools. One of his classmates followed up with a point of view from the other side of the merger.
Superheroes are incredibly sexy, but none of them appear to be having any sex.
Nick Offerman on what it really means to be tough in the outdoors.
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: my friend Kim Cross in Garden & Gun with the story of her beautiful fish-dog.
BONUS DOG NEWS: The dogs trained to sniff out contraband food and plants at airports.
We went to the movies to see MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS, a charming family-friendly film about a London cleaning lady who sets her sights—and her savings— on a Christian Dior dress.
When your cautious kid decides to go off the high dive.
You might have already seen Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, after the brain aneurysm that nearly killed her in 2015. I’ve always respected Joni’s music more than I loved it, but this got me—and it also got Wynonna Judd, wiping tears in the background.
But the song that REALLY hit me in the heart this week snuck up on me in the closing credits of the latest episode of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING. At the end of an episode about friendship and betrayal, they faded out with Mavis Staples’ 2010 cut “You Are Not Alone.” Tell me this doesn’t make you feel something.