Schitt’s Creek, the little show that could, swept the comedy categories last night — even directing and writing — and of course, as Dan Levy joked in one of his speeches, the Internet got a little cranky about it. I actually think that would have been mitigated by not stacking all the comedy categories together at the top of the show; spread out, it would’ve seemed slightly less overwhelming and inevitable. (I wondered if our old friend Logistics had something to do with that? I suspect the Emmy producers had a lot of unusual decisions to make in pulling off this strange night.) But I’m not unhappy about it! This show was discovered by a widespread U.S. audience quite late in its run, and only got noticed by the Emmys for the first time last season, with zero wins; by a lot of accounts, it ended its run on a lovely high-quality note, unlike my dear The Good Place, to name one nominated example. I honestly think the Schitt’s crew all felt like an underdog even as critics picked them as the sentimental favorite to win, and the tears and the hugging and the joy that oozed from them all — they gathered for a (mostly masked) viewing party in Toronto — was just really effing heartwarming. YES. MY OLD COLD SHRIVELED HEART IS WARM AGAIN.
