The Canadian comedy with creative ties to "Heated Rivalry," in its fifth season on Hulu, has its own very different take on love among men.
The fifth season of the oddball Canadian comedy "Shoresy" has its U.S. premiere on Saturday on Hulu, and this time the world will be paying attention, or at least paying a little more attention than it has in the past.
This is because "Shoresy" has an intimate relationship with "Heated Rivalry," the hockey-based soap opera that was an unexpected smash for HBO Max. (Both shows originated with the Canadian streaming service Crave.) Jacob Tierney, who created "Heated Rivalry," is a longtime creative partner of Jared Keeso, who created "Shoresy" and its even more eccentric forerunner, "Letterkenny." Tierney worked as a writer, director, producer and actor on both of Keeso's series and developed "Letterkenny" with him.
Most people who point out the connection between "Shoresy" and "Heated Rivalry" focus on hockey, the milieu in which both shows take place. "Shoresy," which satirizes the fragile egos and performative masculinity of a team of semipro players, is sometimes called the straight counterpart to "Heated Rivalry," a story of the romance between two gay professional stars. But hockey, as central as it is to the shows' settings and story lines, is a backdrop. They're both shows about male love.
And for all the sensation it has caused, "Heated Rivalry," with its audience-pleasing combination of romance-novel melodrama and straightforward sex, is the more conventional of the two. "Shoresy" may have lost some of its rabid comic intensity over the years, but its ribald riffs on brotherly love can still grab your attention in unpredictable ways.
Season 5 begins with Shoresy (played by Keeso), the veteran brawler who is now coach of the Triple-A Sudbury Bulldogs, coming home to find his three roommate-teammates in their respective rooms masturbating. Instead of leading to slapstick high jinks, the discovery spurs a debate about proper methods, positions and inspirations. Shoresy is amazed to learn that one of the men does not use pornography. “You just think of something?” he asks. “Are we on the [expletive] Mayflower?”
Beyond starting the season on a suitably raunchy note, the scene reminds us that the main characters are adult men (and not particularly young ones) who live together with no women in sight. The aging jocks in the show may fetishize a traditional style of masculinity -- they do spend a lot of their time chasing actual women and strategizing how to have sex with them -- but the show consistently undercuts their attempts at machismo. Their comfort with one another is their saving grace; despite their sometimes loutish instincts, their well-intentioned inner children are always just beneath the surface.
Making fun of the notion of sentimental, adolescent camaraderie among overtly macho men is not new. What really sets "Shoresy" apart is its approach to its female characters. Women in sports stories and other male-focused action genres are traditionally dangerous distractions who pull teams apart; here, they're frightening authority figures, running hockey franchises, ice rinks and sports-talk TV shows. They're hard-nosed pragmatists, and the softer-souled men must work together to placate or outwit them. (Even Shoresy, who embodies Canadian indomitability, has a gooey center; Keeso's scenes with Shoresy's girlfriend, a journalist played by Camille Sullivan, are earnest and dull.)
Keeso, who has written every episode of "Shoresy," is good at off-kilter banter. But the show's comic high points are his rapid-fire, monomaniacal set pieces, and the early episodes of Season 5 (four of six were available for review) offer several. There is less hockey action, and therefore less trash talk, than usual, but one uninterrupted two-minute montage of insults is like an operatic exchange on the theme of "your mama." And Keeso’s love of repetition as a comic device gets a showcase in an endless reiteration of Dutch names that sound made up -- Maarschalkerweerd, Donkervoort, Swellengrebel -- but are all actual Dutch names. (It echoes a gag from Season 1.)
No matter how pointed or dark or uncouth it might be, a satire made for commercial broadcast always requires a ballast of sentimentality in order to find a buyer, and "Shoresy" is no exception. The big game that will ensure the future of hockey in northern Ontario for Shoresy and his mates is once again in the offing, this time with a barnstorming team of Europeans who call themselves the E.U. and who, in a joke with both athletic and political resonance, employ a brutal physical style that their Canadian and American rivals can't handle.
We can be sure that the Bulldogs will be up to the true challenge, which will be not defeating the European bullies but pulling together as a team -- proving their love for one another and, by extension, for their Canadian way of life. It may not be as culturally provocative a scenario as the closeted romance of "Heated Rivalry," but in its way, it will probably be just as moving.