Corner Gas - Mid-series assessment

I’ll admit it: I’m a regular listener of Stop Podcasting Yourself. The era of the “guys chatting” podcast is long over — people often recommend me podcasts they tell stories or have non fiction investigations… not the point, people! — but I enjoy the general silly approach to humor on the show as opposed to most other “chat casts” which rely a lot on absurdism. (This is also the source for my favorite root beer joke.) Being a Canadian podcast their pool of guests is limited, so you tend to get more actually funny people rather than big names with stuff to promote. In general Canadian and American realities are more or less miscible but for their big blowout shows or specials they have Brent Butt, who is well known in the provinces for his work on something he referred to in his interviews as “cornugast” or variously “cornugast animated,” both of which sound like some ancient mage, the second after his conversion to lockdown (re-animated?). Only recently, after my years long campaign of reporting any internet advertisement I see as potentially harmful to life and limb (or for extra credit: Other, then write “Langford parrot situation”) did I start getting ads for a here-unnamed Canadian streaming service whose apparent flagship show is in fact “Corner Gas.” The Saskatchewan accent does no favors in an audio medium.

Being the obsessive and frequently-commuting person I am, I’ve now enjoyed half the series while on the train. The premise is that in a rural Canadian backwater, there exists a small town whose economy likely once relied on farming but now just persists, in which a small, successful gas station/cafe is run by the show creator’s self insert, Brent Leroy (Butt), a la Seinfeld. The show is always in summer and there are always new cars buying gas, so conflict arises from petty slights the residents deal each other and squabbles over minor changes. Overall, good! 

Some specific thoughts, in no particular order: 

• The writing, as it needs to be for a sitcom, is very good. There are few wasted lines and everyone is the appropriate level of witty while avoiding breaking character. 
• From an RPG perspective, this is almost the perfect setting for a social game. You can almost imagine the meta currencies being exchanged as townsfolk win small edges over each other. Pretty easy to write a playbook like “exchange one Grievance for two Rumors or one Favor.”
• Speaking of RPGs, C.G. has convinced me I need more “dopes” in my campaign. I tend to make NPCs with some degree of motive and have them respond more or less in agreement with their principles. In the show, Hank tends to cause a lot of plot friction or storyline crossover (vide infra) by not understanding basic stuff, or getting confused about what he actually wants. Better yet is Oscar, who is so focused on being contrarian that his responses are difficult to predict and veer into the absurd. Either as NPCs would add a great element of unreliability to a village.
• Corner gas is quite good at maintaining at least three storylines per episode, which I suppose is standard for sitcoms, but feels fresh to me (weirdly enough) after watching “prestige TV” where it feels almost mandated - people doing their storyline homework. Better Call Saul does this in places but often just gives it up to give you a few episodes straight up - which makes you realize, maybe that’s what they’d rather be doing all the time? I digress. Corner gas succeeds in this because they have a pretty limited set of characters so they are often crossing over between storylines which leads to extra, good misunderstandings. Continuity is well managed between these, with riffs on the same wordplay or ideas reappearing, but usually only for one party of the conversation, again introducing some friction by asymmetry. Being a sitcom, everything goes back to baseline by the end of episode, but you do occasionally see callbacks in later episodes where appropriate, which adds to the theme: there’s no change here because it’s a small town, not because it’s a show.
• There is something extremely appealing about the sort of (mythic) lives led by the residents, whose daily routine is more or less floating around and drinking coffee in a diner. I think I have watched 10,000 mugs of joe consumed in the forty odd episodes which is instilling a terrible craving in me. It’s nice to know that my long standing belief that the diner forms the cornerstone of American quasi-religious existence extends above the 50th parallel. 
• In one episode a new sandwich — the ruby club — was invented and became a smash success. The fact that its ingredients were never disclosed makes it my personal Dead Sea scrolls.
• In season one, the Oscar/Emma feud was not quite balanced. While in later seasons they fought just as much if not more, they also added some moments where they enjoyed each other’s company. This puts them more into the alignment with everyone else in the show, who have persistent problems that they secretly enjoy (e.g., Lacey complaining about small-town life while clearly reveling in the close contacts and her relative power in town).
• At the end of season one they floated a Brent/Lacey relationship…and thankfully rejected it. The show requires relationships to be volatile and pairings in a giving storyline to rotate. (For ex., Karen makes a good “straight man” pairing vs. Davis, but the role is flipped vs. Emma, whereas vs. Wanda you get some “rival” character… more bang for your buck, per character. You get it.) Adding a fixed link in there would have been too annoying to work around.
• Let’s get some snow! In season 3 you finally see a little winter in the Christmas episode, but it looks more like a thin layer of coastal sleet than the drifts you might expect. I suppose the show is designed to give the (possibly accurate) impression that rural Canadians only ambulate in the summer months, retiring to a cave of moose jerky and beer for hibernation.
• The premise of a combination liquor store and insurance agency is great stuff. 
• I honestly believe YouTube is the preferred viewing experience here. People tag the great bits and provide necessary Canadian context to American viewers. This is also how I learned of the fan theory that Hank is secretly the father of Wanda’s terror-child. In the words of one commenter, “the clues are all there but they never confirm it.” 
• Finally, the characters sorted by D&D alignment (more or less): 

LG: Lacey

NG: Emma, Fitzy

CG: Wanda

LN: Karen, Wes

TN: Brent

CN: Hank

LE: Davis

NE: Paul

CE: Oscar

Hoping the second half of the series holds up just as well. Supposedly they ended “at the top of their game” but often people just say that when other constraints force a decision. I’ll use the last 3 seasons’ quality to determine if a pass at the movie is worth it.