You Could Always Just Watch ‘Shoresy’ Instead
this is specific and general advice
The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…
… riiiiiiiiiiight here.
Off we go.
FIVE: Set the tone
Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll Ted Lasso has been picked up for another season. You are welcome to feel however you want to feel about this news. I’ve seen reactions ranging from confusion to annoyance to exhaustion to cautious optimism. I’m sure someone is excited about it somewhere. Maybe it’s you. That’s great! I suspect I will not be watching, though, mainly because the show really started sputtering down the stretch and seemed to be running out of… everything. I did enjoy it at the beginning. I’m not going to go back now and pretend I didn’t. But I also… don’t think we need to do this. It’s okay to just let things go. Or find something new. Or go to Hulu and watch all four seasons of Shoresy in just over a week.
I just did that last thing recently, for the record. I’ve been kinda fried and I was looking for a fun little bedtime show, a comedy I could rip out a few episodes of before I shut things down for the night. I settled on Shoresy, a show that had been recommended by a few smart people I know. I came in blind, too, which should have made it trickier. Shoresy is a spinoff of Letterkenny about hockey players in Canada and I am an American who doesn’t watch hockey and hasn’t seen Letterkenny. And guess what: God, I loved Shoresy.
It’s got just about everything you could want out of a sports show: an underdog story, triumphant arcs, swearing, grownups behaving like children, more swearing, silly wordplay, an unconventional leader, a female team owner who is intense and a little scary, really just everything people liked about Ted Lasso but funnier and meaner and sustainable. Each season is six episodes long and each episode is 20-30 minutes. You can do a whole season in a few hours. You could do all four in a single rainy weekend. There are worse uses of your time.
That’s what I meant by the headline of this newsletter. You could always just watch Shoresy instead. Instead of watching Ted Lasso. Instead of complaining about Ted Lasso. Instead of doomscrolling. Instead of doing whatever else is bumming you out or annoying you or making your shoulders all tense. You have options, is my point.
One of them is binge-watching Shoresy.
