![]() At one point there was an acupuncturist and a chiropractor coming to set every day at lunch to work on my neck so that I could actually perform and not, you know, look like I needed a neck brace.” And the more I wanted to create more compelling and dimensional stories, the more we wanted to expand our world.”īy series six, he says, the stress got so bad that he had to wear a neck brace, “because the anxiety in my neck was so bad I couldn’t move it. “Because the more we built the show, the more proud of it I was. Some weeks, he says, “I didn’t sleep more than eight hours.”Īnd as the sitcom grew and grew, it didn’t get easier, he says, but harder. As lead actor, writer and all-round showrunner, he would be picked up at 5am, drive to set, rehearse and rewrite scenes, make decisions about wardrobe and sets, approve budgets, film, sometimes act, sometimes direct, all before spending a couple of hours running the writers’ room, before getting home to quickly eat, after which he would often be writing until 2am. Levy says he didn’t have a social life for the six years they were making Schitt’s Creek. ![]() “So his desires and my desires needed to coexist in order to get to the place where we landed.” Of course, the problem would be selling it: “How do you convince someone that what’s on the page is eventually going to be funny? So, you know, there needs to be a certain amount of jokes on the page for it to read as funny.” They put in, he says, “a few more jokes” to make both his father, and the TV stations, more comfortable. The neat narrative about this is that the rest was plain sailing: within six months they were out pitching the idea and, as Levy puts it, “Everything just kind of steamrollered”. Happily, he was related to a man who did. Levy started writing lines, moments, but didn’t have a clue about how one wrote an actual TV show. “I knew I wanted it to be about a wealthy family that didn’t know each other, that were very far away from each other in their lives and that had to be brought back together because they lost their money, and what would that look like?” “I knew I had the emotional nugget of the show,” he says. It wasn’t long, though, until the idea for Schitt’s Creek arrived – one that had really been percolating all that time. And in the end it was a struggle in a way that didn’t feel productive any more.” Still, he says, “I walked away from it and I didn’t have any other prospects at the time.” Was there a single moment that made him quit? Yet Levy would spend more than a decade as an MTV host in Canada, notably helming The Hills: The After Show (another chance to dissect the numbly affluent), and found his ego so sated that it was tough to leave. Yet when they arrived, all the other kids just moaned. Venice – imagine! He’d never been outside North America. ![]() He’d even booked himself on a course once he got there. ![]() He’d spent weeks, months, convincing his parents to let him go and then just as long working, saving up for the share they insisted he pay. He remembers, particularly, a school trip to Venice. And money, in an attempt to adhere some sort of cohesion to the family dynamic, ended up stripping everyone of passion.” There is, he thinks, “a real sadness to hyper-privileged people”. They had actually become immune to experience. “These kids were so overindulged that nothing resonated with them. Levy lasted two years before demanding to be sent back. Yet despite his parents’ insistence on not spoiling him and his sister, they were both sent to private school. His father, a comedy legend and star of such Christopher Guest classics as Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman, along with the odd American Pie movie, if that’s your thing, purposefully chose to move back to Canada in order to raise his children, lest they became the kind of offspring from whom everything sounds like a question, despite the fact nothing is. Still, he looks back at the show now and says, “We could have had no idea how much it would parallel so many people’s lives.”Īs far back as high school, Dan Levy was always fascinated by privilege. His mother, Levy says, “was just really thrilled we were finally talking about other things”. “But when we were doing the show, so much of the conversation was consumed by it.” He and his father would find themselves problem-solving the series even in their regular father-son time. “It brought us professionally much closer,” he allows. Yet was it not, I wonder, a bit of a busman’s holiday? Along with its late-run success, Schitt’s Creek was notable for being very much a family affair: Levy cocreated the show with his father and it also co-starred his sister, Sarah Levy, who played the town’s waitress. ‘We could have had no idea how much Schitt’s Creek would parallel so many lives’
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