Well, I just finished Shoresy, and to say I loved it is and understatement. What a great show! Seriously, I thought het romance was dead after watching The Summer I Turned Pretty last week, but Shoresy and Laura Mohr have shown me that Jacob Tierney can do anything. Absolutely brilliant.
Also, Heated Rivalry is full of callbacks to it, and it's so much fun to reheat with Shoresy in your brain and to imagine them all taking place in the same universe.
Maybe my favourite thing in Shoresy is the way "BroDude Energy" (the hilarious name of a hockey podcast in the show) and a deep and abiding respect for women co-exists in such a convincing way, and the way both women and men presented and relating to each other as sexual objects, complete with slow-mo hot girl cam, co-exists with connections between the men and women on the show that are so much deeper. There's a realism there that acknowledges the facts of so many gendered relationships, and says that real connection and deep respect can live alongside them.
For example, it's so funny that the NOSHO AAA hockey league is entirely run by First Nations Canadian women who refer to the hockey players as "our sluts", and "You don't date sluts, you just knock 'em over". I love the character of Nat, the team's manager, who is super unbelievably hot but never is cat-called or objectified by a whole team of very intense dude-bros, and who knows and loves Shorey down to his bones as his manager and his friend. I love their mutual respect for each other, the way they clash and capitulate to each other, and the way a super hot lady and the main dude character deeply loving and respecting each other never becomes an ick-inducing subplot.
And, don't even get me started on Shoresy's actual love interest, Laura Mohr, and the way he is so down bad for her.
Every time he speaks to her is my favourite thing about that show. I love how hard she makes him work for it, and how it's not for dumb drama-manufacturing story reasons, but because she is a serious person, and the single mom of a little boy and she can't afford to be frivolous about her love life, and she quite reasonably "doesn't date sluts." I absolutely love that his most successful pitch to her is that he'd love to find out if he could "make her life easier" somehow. Like...sorry, but THAT'S ROMANCE. The scene where he is on a boat with all his boys -- the other hockey bros and the HS boys they mentor -- making an increasingly crazy list of terrible things he would do (give a tarantula a Thai rubdown even though spiders terrify him, lick a bum's big toe, learn to love cats!) just to be allowed to help her with menial household chores is epic fucking TV.
And all this co-exists with the most brutal, digusting and hilarious "your mom" jokes ever written.
Shoresy my friends. If you have not seen it, do yourself a solid because it is DELICIOUS. Also, Jacob Tierney plays a hilarious Quebecois hockey announcer in a terrible toupee and I love him.
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
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