Dave Thomas and Son Try to Recreate ‘Schitt’s Creek’ SCTV-to-Sitcom Magic
See if this one sounds familiar: Beloved SCTV comedy star teams up with his son to produce a Canada-themed sitcom about the funny foibles of family. Hey, it worked great for Schitt’s Creek, the Eugene Levy/Dan Levy collab that ended up with nine Emmys over the course of its six-season run. So it’s no wonder that the CBC and BBC Studios are ponying up the cash for The Orange, a Canada-themed sitcom about the funny foibles of family produced by beloved SCTV comedy star Dave Thomas and his son Harrison.
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Can lightning strike twice? The Thomas family effort sounds a lot darker than Schitt’s Creek, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Here’s the premise of The Orange, according to a synopsis in The Hollywood Reporter: “A family witnesses a gangland bombing and is placed by The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in a witness protection program in Rye, England. Only when they reach their new U.K. home does the family realize the Mounties have been dumping all their witnesses and informants in Rye, including Canada’s most hardened criminals who are now their next-door neighbors.”
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Wacky! And potentially a great black comedy, depending on how the Thomas family decides to play it. In our book, the more hardened the criminals, the better.
Thomas the elder is still probably best known for his stint on SCTV. He did a killer Bob Hope, was one of the Five Neat Guys and most famously played the slightly smarter half of the beer-chugging McKenzie Brothers alongside Rick Moranis. Or was Moranis the slightly smarter one?
We don’t know as much about Harrison, although he’s appeared on House, Fringe, Criminal Minds, Silicon Valley and Lucifer, as well as multiple episodes as Lyle on Better Call Saul. That’s a more impressive resume than Dan Levy had prior to Schitt’s Creek, with an IMDb profile that listed a handful of Degrassi: The Next Generation episodes as his main claim to fame.
Father-and-son team-ups are tough to pull off, though. Despite the Levys success, it’s hard to point to another one that comes close. Does Jerry Stiller showing up in Ben’s Zoolander count? Tom and Colin Hanks did a father-son thing in The Great Buck Howard, which none of us have seen. Fingers crossed, Dave and Harrison — here’s hoping you can duplicate that SCTV-to-sitcom success.
