I can’t believe I’ve made it this far writing and I haven’t mentioned one of the best shows out there – Corner Gas.
I stumbled upon Corner Gas while wandering around Amazon Prime’s offerings. Hadn’t heard of it. It looked…well, there’s not too much to it. It’s about a gas station/diner in the middle of Saskatchewan (yeah – it’s Canadian!). It’s tag line is “40 miles from nowhere.” It’s theme song starts out “First you tell me that your dog ran away. Then you tell me that it took three days” (I’ll explain it to you if you need me too – it’s hilarious!).
And did I mention, it’s Canadian?!? The most popular Canadian sitcom ever.
And for Americans, that might seem odd because the main story line isn’t about who’s having sex with whom, and the comedy of the show isn’t based on innuendo and toilet humor. As a matter of fact, the show only hints at best that a couple of the characters might be interested in each other…and that only for a short while. The subject just doesn’t come up for the entire six seasons of the show. And you just don’t notice its absence either (which probably tells you a lot about American sitcoms too: Gotta have drama. Gotta have tension. Gotta have sex. Gotta have social dilemmas.).
How about just being funny and making me laugh without having to rely on the same cliches and risqué story lines? Now there’s a novel idea.
And that’s why Corner Gas works. It’s just plain funny – and thoughtfully so.
One last interesting point about Corner Gas, and probably why I’m bringing the show up now. I’m a notoriously bad sleeper. I wake up in the middle of the night just about every night for no apparent reason. It usually takes me a little time to get back to sleep, and sometimes I’ll use something like a podcast to help me. Last night, nothing was working, so I went to another standby that helps – I’ll put on a TV show and that usually knocks me out pretty quickly. But no dice. And then I remembered Corner Gas. A couple of years back I’d fallen asleep to just about every episode I ever watched after 10 PM. This might sound like a bad thing, but it absolutely isn’t. Corner Gas is a show that just makes me comfortable. I’ve seen it all and loved every bit of it. So seeing it again is like being in the company of an old friend. It’s so comforting, it puts me right to sleep.
And so I’ll always love Corner Gas for more reasons than its comedy, and I hope you give it a try and maybe find the same comfort. You can still find it on Amazon, but even there is comes through IMDb, which will play a few ads during the show. I don’t know about the ads though, I’m usually asleep by the time the first one shows up…