Schitt’s Creek’s Eugene & Daniel Levy

Eugene Levy is perhaps best known from his quirky, unconventional characters in such films as the American Pie movies or Christopher Guest mockumentaries. The actor is bringing his comedic talents to television now in the single-camera comedy Schitt’s Creek, and he is doing so in partnership with his son Daniel Levy. Eugene and Daniel co-created the character-driven series and also star in it. Schitt’s Creek was commissioned by Canada’s CBC and will become the first-ever original scripted series on POP in the U.S. with its January 2015 debut. ITV Studios Global Entertainment is selling the show internationally. Eugene and Daniel spoke to World Screen about the process of collaborating on this father-son project.

WS: What was the genesis of the show?
EUGENE: I’d like to say it was all my idea, but it wasn’t. [Laughs] My son came to me about two years ago with an idea that he had for a show and asked if I wanted to work on it. I said, Sure! We developed this story about a very wealthy family who lose everything, and we got it to a point where we shot a pilot and got it sold. The sensibility of this project was something that we both shared.
DANIEL: The idea came from seeing these huge celebrity families in the media, and I started to think about what would happen if one of these families were to lose everything. What’s keeping them together? What would tear them apart?

We began to research how wealthy people had lost their money. One of the stories we came across was someone who invested in a town and it didn’t work out. That sent us on a journey as to this idea of, What if they had bought a town, then they lost their money, and the only thing the government didn’t want to take from them was this town that they had bought as a joke because it was called Schitt’s Creek—then they get stuck there. With them having to be in this town together, we could really explore the idea of what this family is, what’s been holding them together and what will need to hold them together so that they don’t completely fall apart.

WS: Did you always envision the both of you starring in it as well?
EUGENE: We kind of knew that this would be a vehicle for us. It was exciting for me because we’ve never really worked together. He’s never ever relied on me or come to me for anything, going back to the earliest years in high school when he was acting. So the idea of working together on this was really an exciting thing, and the idea that we were also going to be in it was also really exciting. It’s been an eye-opening ride over the past year because I knew what I could do and what I’ve done (good, bad or indifferent), but I wasn’t 100 percent sure about Daniel. [Laughs] As an actor, it’s been fun watching him explode over the past four months shooting the show.
DANIEL: It’s also been unbelievably challenging! There are so many stages to the creation of a television show and we have our hands in all of them—we wrote it, produced it, we’re in it, we’re in post-production. There’s a lot that goes into it.
EUGENE: And yet we’re still talking, and he’s not estranged.

WS: Did the family dynamic make it easier or harder to work together?
EUGENE: It probably made it a little harder in the sense that you can’t necessarily be as honest as you could be if you were just working with another partner. You have this family thing underpinning everything. We did have some moments where we had creative differences, but the amazing thing is that we rode through those differences. What for me was a lovely father-son project to begin with ended up showing me that I have an unbelievably great producing partner.
DANIEL: I thought you were going to say “…fell into a nightmare!” [Laughs] You do get to a point where it’s no longer about niceties because time runs out and you really just have to push through. We both come from different worlds and to have them come together on the show has been to the benefit.

WS: How did you go about assembling this all-star cast?
EUGENE: We definitely had Catherine O’Hara in mind from the very beginning. Catherine is absolutely brilliant, always has been. I’ve worked with her for a lot of years. It was such a bonus to actually land her because she was so reticent about doing television to begin with.
Annie Murphy was a find who is just spectacular; she’s so exciting, so photogenic, so talented.
DANIEL: Ultimately, with the cast and the show in general, there was such attention paid to the detail. There was never a situation where we said, “Ugh, this is fine; let’s hope that it works.” When you see the show, you see that level of detail that’s been put into everything.

We have Chris Elliott, who is a comedy icon himself, and then the young cast that we found are a really, really talented group of actors who are funny and can turn on a dramatic dime. There’s such depth and dimension to all of these characters that it was a long and painful process to find everybody because we really didn’t stop until we knew we had it right.
EUGENE: They all have an honesty about them as well that is at the core of what makes them all very special. This is a very behavioral kind of show, and the tone of the show is very grounded in truth and reality. Everybody that’s in it cast-wise has reflected that tone in such an amazing way that the show has become very human.

WS: What is it about the show that is going to make it resonate internationally?
DANIEL: From a comedic standpoint, it is grounded in reality and is not a sitcom. It’s a single-camera comedy. Yet while not being a sitcom, it is quite literally a situational comedy. I think that’s where the universal legs come in, because when you have people in a situation that is inherently funny, whether you are understanding the language or not, you understand the situation. There’s universality. There’s a level of relationship that you have with a situation that you might not have with a joke, and that’s where this show is rooted: in situation and really making sure that in each scene you have a character that is in a situation that is just not the right fit.
EUGENE: The one thing that we really tried to go after is that the audience has to have an emotional involvement with the characters in the show if it’s going to succeed. The show is not about jokes; it’s about the characters, and the audience really has to get into them and buy into them and want to be with them and root for them.
DANIEL: What really works is that it’s not just a surface comedy. There is an emotional layer to the show that really pulls you in from episode one. There’s something under the surface that’s not just making you laugh, it’s also making you feel for this family. On paper they’re not very likeable people, so the journey that you’re taken on through the first season is actually one that’s very funny but can also be sad at times, can be melancholic, can be poignant. There’s so much depth there that there’s more at stake than just comedy.

WS: Why did you choose to tell this story on TV as opposed to doing a film?
EUGENE: It started out as a television idea. Quite honestly, television is a very exciting medium right now—every which way, dramatically and comedically. Some great product is coming out of television and there’s a creative freedom that television has never seen the likes of before. It’s much more exciting, for me, to think of this show being done for television than the idea of making it into a movie.
DANIEL: What my dad has done with Christopher Guest and the movies that they’ve done together has really explored the character dynamic—breaking open who characters are, how they act and how they work. The idea of exploring character over a multi-season arc is what was exciting and what he is so good at. That’s what is making TV so exciting too, this ability to take an idea that theoretically could be a movie but when you crack it open into an episodic story there’s a richness to it. You’re really able to explore and have fun with character and really examine people, lives and relationships in a way that you’re not able to do in an hour-and-a-half [movie].