Crave crude comedy? Streaming show up your alley

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This article was published 06/02/2016 (3908 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a tricky business, turning a one-joke premise into a full-length scripted comedy.

Just ask the Saturday Night Live writers who tried to transform such popular-but-limited sketches as Coneheads, It’s Pat and MacGruber into feature films — the results can be (and in all three of these cases, were) both disastrous and painfully unfunny.

That’s why there was cause for legitimate concern when Bell Media announced it was adapting Letterkenny Problems, the popular online series of comedy mini-sodes, into a half-hour comedy that would serve as a marquee attraction for the Crave TV streaming service’s nationwide launch (it will later become part of Comedy’s springtime schedule).

Letterkenny Problems, which was created by rural Ontario-born actor Jared Keeso (19-2, Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story), is a series of short (90 to 120 seconds) segments in which a couple of fast-talking farm-country tough guys spew rapid-fire insults and observations about the people and things that annoy them.

In the brief online bits, Wayne and pal Daryl (Keeso and co-star Nathan Dales) offer such straight-at-the-camera nuggets of rural wisdom as: “You drove the riding mower (drunk), and now you got a corn maze,’ and “A skid from up-country called your sister a slut, so you have to fight him, but he’s so (expletive) greasy you almost don’t want to,’ and “You got an impaired driving up to bowling, then you find out they don’t serve OV any more.’

The Letterkenny Problems shorts were a huge hit, viewed online more than 10 million times, so it’s hardly surprising Bell Media took notice and offered Keeso and company a chance to spin their mini-sode spoofs into a full-fledged TV comedy.

But that’s where the tricky-business part comes in — the TV-adaptation exercise requires turning the one-liner-dispensing farm boys into fully developed characters with backstories, homes and friends, and creating a detailed fictional world filled with other fully realized characters and multi-layered, TV-episode-length storylines.

To call Letterkenny a complete success in meeting that challenge would be an overstatement. But the good news, for fans of the online version who have high hopes for this next-level advancement of the concept, is that Letterkenny isn’t a dismal failure, either.

The four episodes provided for preview contain more than their share of laugh-out-loud moments, but they also have long passages that will leave even the most dedicated farm-fun followers thinking the entire exercise might be a waste of time.

In order to turn the abbreviated Problems into sitcom-length Letterkenny, the world of Wayne and Daryl has been expanded to include Wayne’s hot, opinionated and sexually adventurous sister, Katy (Michelle Mylett), and the boys’ big, burly buddy, Dan (comedian K. Trevor Wilson, who recently concluded a headlining stint at Rumor’s Comedy Club). The rural community (pop. 5,000) is also inhabited by dimwitted hockey-player types Jonesy and Reilly (Dylan Playfair, Andrew Herr), the meth-head “skids’ led by Stewart and Devon (Tyler Johnston, Alexander De Jordy), and random townsfolk such as bartender Gail (Lisa Codrington) and local preacher Glen (Jacob Tierney).

The storylines, such as they are, are pretty flimsy. The series opener focuses on Wayne’s decision to reconsider the no-fighting promise he made to a former girlfriend, while subsequent instalments deal with a weirdly traditional birthday party interrupted by Wayne’s defence of his tough-guy reputation, the startup of a flatulence-focused social-media site, and a bar bet to see which of the “hicks’ can end his spring-fever frustration first.

As long as you don’t expect much in the way of narrative logic or depth, Letterkenny might just make you laugh — provided, of course, you’re inclined to giggle at crude insults, sexually explicit (and generally twisted) references and profane but inspired slang dialogue. If your tastes run toward a tamer brand of comedy, the advice here is to take as wide a detour around Letterkenny as your TV-watching navigation will allow.

Think of it this way: if the première of Trailer Park Boys left you doubled over with laughter, thankful that Canadian TV’s long-awaited great comedy had finally arrived, Letterkenny might just be the series that convinces you — as Bell/CTV surely hopes it will — that a trial subscription to Crave TV is worth a shot.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald