Why Letterkenny is the Utopia for Our Times
For a while, I’ve been thinking about this question: Why are there no significant utopian stories in pop culture today? Dystopias are everywhere. But what about stories that offer the potential for a better society, point us toward how humans could live in a world of equality, without want or power games? And then I realized there’s one of these stories right under my nose, with nine seasons streaming on Hulu. I’m talking, of course, about the brilliant Canadian sitcom Letterkenny.
Unlike other utopian stories — say Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time or Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom — Letterkenny doesn’t waste any time explaining how society was reordered, or the nuts and bolts of its economy. But it’s clear that it takes place in some type of alternate universe. First off, everyone in the show drinks beer almost constantly and frequently engages in physical violence, yet no one is ever seriously ill or badly injured. Obviously, this world has some type of futuristic preventative health care or treatments happening off-camera.
What I’m more interested in, though, is how work is organized in this utopia. While Wayne and his Hick friends do hard, productive labor on a farm, none of the other main characters seem to do anything we typically understand as “work.” Jonsey and Reilly ground their identities in playing hockey, without any of the pressures pro athletes face in our real-world capitalist system. Stewart and the Skids spend their days breakdancing, doing drugs, and playing video games. And, crucially, no one suffers either material hardship or social stigma for their lack of “productivity.” (Wayne may look down on the Skids, but that’s more a personality quirk of his than an indication of a hegemonic view.)
One reason people often give for the paucity of utopian fiction is that it’s necessarily kind of boring. Many works — Star Trek, for example — solve this problem by locating the action at the margins of the utopia. Heroes must go beyond their perfect world for adventure, or are thrust into action by external threats. The message, implicitly or explicitly, is that human thriving necessarily consists in overcoming adversity and gaining evermore knowledge and power. These works have little interest in day-to-day life inside a perfect society. But that’s exactly where Letterkenny finds its material.
Freed from wage work, precarity, and status competition, Letterkenny’s alternate-world humans are not filled with ennui or at a loss for how to fill their days. They joyously engage in battles with rival groups (more a sporting activity than an actual violent conflict, given the aforementioned high-tech health care). They play endless creative games with the English language. They plan parties, go ice fishing, pursue and enjoy sex, and rewatch old movies. They drink and do drugs with no sense of guilt. Most of all, they reinforce and celebrate group bonds through shared activities and the endless layering of inside jokes.
Letterkenny does not purport to offer us a blueprint for a better world. It doesn’t tell us how to share the fruits of automation, stave off the horrors of a warming world, or fight corporate greed and authoritarian white supremacy. What it does do is give us a glimpse of the world that could await us if we managed to do those things.
