I really enjoyed the Trailer Park Boys and consider it to be one of the most brilliantly filmed and produced low-budget and risky shows of all time. They went from having zero money and a lot of good ideas into become somewhat mainstream and making cult-legends out of some people that likely wouldn't have been in the fame limelight otherwise. That show only got better with time and when it started to fizzle out they knew when to walk away.
Shoresy I believe is attempting to follow in their footsteps but with a slightly different low-class-Canadian sort of appeal in that they focus on a group of mostly foul-mouthed hockey players and their constant push to be the best in the game.
I'll start things out by saying that I have a rough time with odd accents and an even rougher time with French. The show embraces both of these things and presents them in the most absurd way possible in that the main characters, especially Shorsy, as talking in such a way that is meant to be barely understandable. This can be fun once you figure it out, but can also be really tough to someone who has a less than perfect sound system. For example: Me. I have two TV's in my house. The one in my bedroom has a sort of wonky damage to the speakers that can make some series or films almost impossible to tell what the person on screen is saying and subtitles become necessary. Subtitles kind of ruin the experience in this show because the whole idea behind having the absurd dialogue is that it is absurd. If your subs change the word "tarp" that is being said by Shoresy as in "why do all the fellas have their tarps off" and it changes that to "tops" a lot of the humor is lost.
If you don't know a great deal about hockey, don't worry about that because it isn't really an important part of the story and I question whether or not most of the people in the cast can actually even skate. They certainly don't focus a great deal on action shots in this. For the most part, just like Trailer Park Boys, this is a dialogue-driven show but unlike TPB it is not done in a documentary style where the characters are frequently doing interviews. It is 3rd person and I suppose it can be somewhat enjoyable.
I think this is one of those things that kind of grows on you the more you watch it and that is why I am not going to give up on it. I do recall giving up on Trailer Park Boys at one time and I ended up regretting that because part of enjoying, I think, both series is that you have to become familiar with the individual characters and understand their quirks before the real humor starts to happen.
having never spent much time around hockey players parts of it are a bit of an education for me such as the above scene where some "tough guys" try to step to the players and the players have zero fear even though the people that are stepping to them are huge. The hockey players show that they are all missing teeth before the fight begins and later we see the big dudes all on the ground unconscious. I would imagine that is not too distant from what would actually happen since hockey is basically a fight that happens to have a puck involved in it every now and then.
One thing that really stands out for me that is really good about this series is the musical montages that they frequently have. These are done exceptionally well and often the songs that I am not familiar with are absolute "bangers" too. I believe this is all original music so I gotta give props to whoever their musical supervisor is because those scenes, which normally will happen as bookends on the start and finish of each episode, really make the show.
Should I watch it ?
That trailer doesn't really do a good job of explaining what watching the show is really like. It is more of a comedy than anything else and a rather uncomfortable comedy at that most of the time.
The episodes are less than half an hour long and the story doesn't really seem all that important. Instead they focus on individual skits of sorts that are funny in their own regard for various reasons. It is difficult to explain but I have to respect the unusual and completely original angle they are going for here. This is unlike any other series I have ever seen and while I don't enjoy all of it, I enjoy enough of it to carry on.
This series is only legally available to stream as part of a subscription via Hulu, it can be purchased through almost all of the other major streaming services. It has no availability on Netflix
