Dan Levy On The Comedic Alchemy Behind Schitt's Creek

Dan Levy is the star, creator, showrunner, and helicopter parent of Schitt’s Creek, the biggest little show on television.

- E. Alex Jung

Here’s what I think we should do,” says Dan Levy, fingering a rack of Balenciaga at L.A.’s freshly opened Dover Street Market. He gives me a glance I’m familiar with, amused and slightly conspiratorial, his lips curling like a scroll. It’s a restrained version of the unbridled facial reactions he delivers as his character, David Rose, on Schitt’s Creek, the sitcom he co-created with his father, SCTV legend and American Pie regular Eugene Levy. Or the look he gave Larry King when the octogenarian host asked him to explain pan sexuality on TV.

“I say we do just a full fashion look,” Levy continues. “Label whore–y.” He pulls on an oversize matte-gray Balenciaga hoodie and a pair of black Vetements sweatpants. Total retail price: about $1,730 before sales tax.

“David would wear these sweatpants for sure. Just letting people know that you have money,” he says, considering himself in the dressing-room mirror. Buying the outfit is wholly unrealistic, though, both for the show’s budget (“Fourteen episodes of our show is comparable to what one single episode of a larger, bigger-budget blockbuster show costs,” says Levy) and because it’s not period appropriate, so back to the rack it goes.

The story of Schitt’s Creek revolves around the members of the Rose family— the father, Johnny (played by the elder Levy); the mother, Moira (Catherine O’Hara); and their two kids, Alexis (Annie Murphy) and David—who find themselves bamboozled and bankrupt, all of their assets repossessed save for their considerable wardrobes and a small town called Schitt’s Creek that David’s parents once bought him as a gag gift.