by Alex Tilton 

I was a latecomer to the Hulu exclusive series ‘Letterkenny’, of which Shoresy is a spinoff. Centered around a group of self-described hicks in a rural Canadian farming town, Letterkenny itself was an outgrowth of a YouTube series called ‘Letterkenny Problems’. Each season is only 6 episodes long, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in quality. The writing is relentlessly good. At no point in any of the 60+ episodes that make up the first ten seasons of Letterkenny does the quality ever crash. The dialogue is rapid, adult, clever, and eye poppingly funny. And one of the highlights of Letterkenny is a hockey player character called ‘Shoresy’. Shoresy is the most foul-mouthed individual you’ve ever met. A master artist of vicious mockery, he became an immediate fan favorite in spite of his relatively infrequent appearances.

Played by Letterkenny series creator Jared Kesso (who also plays main character Wayne in Letterkenny), Shoresy never showed his face at any point in the original series. He was always either viewed from behind, or wearing a tinted hockey mask, or (most often) hurling verbal abuse at his teammates from within a toilet stall.

At first I suspected that Shoresy’s face would never be shown even in his own series. But, to the fans delight, the first trailer that dropped simply did away with this gimmick. A suitably different looking Jared Keeso emerged from a toilet stall after eviscerating his coach and team for losing a hockey game and we finally got a look at the guy. In that same moment we learned what Shoresy was going to be about. It was not a show about a man who just happened to be a hockey player. Shoresy is a show about Hockey.

Hockey culture, hockey players, a hockey town, hockey games….everything in this show is Hockey. And in this way it immediately claims its own identity apart from Letterkenny. The writing is different too. It retains the same signature lightning-fast exchanges of artful verbal abuse, but in smaller doses, choosing instead to focus more on who the characters are and what they want to be. I’m hard pressed to find anything wrong. There aren’t any flaws that stick out well enough for me to remember them. It might not be perfect but it’s awfully close. (Image source: IMDb.com)