Son — Of A Critch

If you haven’t stumbled onto this CBC (and CW) gem yet, allow me to offer a recommendation: clear your Sunday evening. You’re about to get hooked. Based on the bestselling memoir by comedian Mark Critch (yes, the guy from This Hour Has 22 Minutes ), the show is a semi-autobiographical look at growing up in 1980s St. John’s, Newfoundland.

We follow (a brilliantly awkward Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), an 11-year-old who is too smart for his own good but too naïve to survive middle school. He lives with his sharp-tonged father, Mike (Mark Critch playing a fictionalized version of his own real dad), his doting grandmother (the legendary Claire Rankin), and his older brother, Mike Jr. Son of a Critch

Yes, there are rotary phones, VHS tapes, and hair band posters. But Son of a Critch doesn't use the 80s as a gimmick. It uses the era to show a time when kids had actual freedom (and actual danger). The jokes about smoking behind the shed or trying to buy a Penthouse magazine at the corner store hit a very specific, very funny nerve for Gen X and elder Millennials. If you haven’t stumbled onto this CBC (and

There’s a specific type of comfort that comes from watching a show where the stakes are low, the insults are witty, and the protagonist is constantly tripping over his own oversized feet. For me, that show right now is Son of a Critch . John’s, Newfoundland