Shoresy is so much smarter—and funnier—than its meathead hero might suggest

The heart of it all is Shoresy himself, who represents everything that is good—and a bit that’s not, probably—about Keeso’s incredibly distinctive writing and acting styles. Noted for both his endless trash-talking and his tendency to cry during the Canadian national anthem, Shoresy is a joke character whom the show itself only rarely treats like a joke; as voiced in a fast-talking, heavily accented falsetto by Keeso, nearly everything about him is deliberately ridiculous and kind of awful, except his passion for his life’s work. Rude, violent, impeccably witty, and sometimes shockingly sweet—as in the one episode per season we get to spend with his utterly devoted adopted family, with Canadian comedy legend Scott Thompson playing his equally hilarious and brutal dad—Shoresy is surface-level grotesque, mid-level hilarious, and deep-down beautiful.

Which is, in some ways, Keeso and Tierney’s whole thing. Letterkenny and Shoresy are both filled with touches that are, at first glance, at least mildly repellant—most notably, both shows’ endless interest in putting female characters in the skimpiest outfits available and then having the camera leer at them in slow-motion. Beneath those elements, though—the trappings of small-town boredom for one show, hockey-minded meathead-ism the other—runs an incredible verbal wit that’s unlike pretty much anything else on TV. Shoresy, if anything, is even more devoted than the original show to the strange rhythms of repeated lines, escalating callbacks, and the deliberate calls and responses its characters speak. (Not that either series is simply an exercise in strange conversational structures and horrifying euphemisms for human genitalia; few shows on TV can deliver a more brutally hilarious one-liner or takedown.) And then Keeso and Tierney use that incredible comedy apparatus to sucker-punch you with moments of genuine human connection, as when Shoresy confesses to his local reporter crush (Camille Sullivan) in season two that he keeps playing crappy hockey in a crappy league because it’s the only place on Earth where he feels like he can be himself.

Shoresy, and Letterkenny, are tricky shows to blindly recommend to others, because they both require a sort of road to Damascus moment to click. You have to spend some time with the dialogue, let it kick around in your head, and then have the realization that nobody else on TV is working at this pace, and this intensity, of rapid-fire joke-telling—not even the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia crew, who are probably the closest Stateside equivalent—in order to understand why both shows create fanatics. The payoffs are incredible, though: gut-bustingly funny comedies that deliver just enough of a bracing dose of real feeling to work as actual human stories. Letterkenny is ending (with its final batch premiering December 26), but Shoresy—which has already been renewed for its third season—is a worthy successor.

Shoresy is available to stream now on Hulu.