TV Review: Pop’s ‘Schitt’s Creek’

In this Canadian sitcom, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara play a wealthy couple who lose all their money and are forced to move to the town that they had bought as a joke: Schitt’s Creek. The series, which also costars Levy’s son Daniel and Annie Murphy as their kids and features Chris Elliott, premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Pop, formerly TVGN. The following are reviews from TV critics around the web, compiled by B&C.

“Do not be put off by the name or by the unfamiliarity of the venue. Or by the provenance, our comedic debt to Canada being beyond measure. It's very funny, beautifully played, sometimes touching and, though its premise is familiar — rich family loses money — quite its own animal.”
Robert Lloyd, LA Times

“Make no mistake: This is pure comedy, with no hidden social agendas, no thinly disguised commentary on human behavior — nothing at all of much importance, except a whole lot of laughs.”
David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

“Seldom has a title been more descriptive than Schitt’s Creek, a tired reunion of SCTV’s Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara that makes a case for putting a cap on Canadian imports.”
Brian Lowry, Variety

“The first sitcom from the renamed TVGN does create cartoon characters. But it uses them well, and better yet, the jokes mostly mine popular culture and the blithe silliness of the rich.”
David Hinckley, New York Daily News

“Mr. Levy, in particular, is as funny as ever [...] But he’s doing that in a losing cause, a show that’s drab and underwritten, with potentially amusing (if familiar) situations that never build to more than a chuckle or a nod of recognition: Yeah, that could have been funny. Comedy that wants to be over the top is at odds with a production that’s minor-key and pedestrian. Whatever energy was associated with the show seems to have been spent on thinking up the title.”
Mike Hale, New York Times