A few notes on the final season and the conclusion of Schitt's Creek, and no spoilers!

Just a few notes on the final season, Season 6, of the Eugene and Daniel Levy series Schitt’s Creek, with no spoilers: There’s no doubt that this excellent series, which is both hilarious and completely engaging, is one of the few comedy-miniseries of our time in which the show gets better with each passing season and ends on the right note at the right time, going out on a high rather than stretching out the plot till it’s hanging by a string. It’s also one of the few shows in which the characters evolve over the course of the production – they all are (six years) older, tougher, wisely, and more worldly at the end than at the outset. There’s universal agreement that not only did the characters become better people over the course of the six sesons but also that the show itself became better – sharper, funnier, more endearing. At the first episode, we saw a family, the Rose family (Eugene and Daniel Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Annie Murphy) suddenly bankrupt and forced to sell off the baronial estate and move into a rundown motel in the eponymous village. The humor, such as it was, involved their discomfort and the crude and bumptious behavior of the town residents. Over time, the beauty of this series is that the Rose family gradually becomes part of the community, changing their lives and the lives of their neighbors. Two aspects deserve special mention: First, though the homosexual love between and, in the last season, marriage of David Rose (Daniel Levy) and his partner Patrick (Noah Reid) is a key plot element but it is never treated as an “issue,” never opposed or questioned or confronted to make plot points – it’s just part of life in our time. Second, there are so many ways in which the final season could have gotten cheesy or fallen back on the cliches of a “Hollywood Ending,” with love and happiness for all, but the show never veers off course and builds to a completely moving, credible, and somewhat open ending that seems and feels just right. The series, after its rocky start, seems right all around and is one of the best family-drama miniseries, along with the in many ways quite different series, Friday Night Lights.