Schitts Creek, the beloved Canadian sitcom, which wrapped up, on Tuesday, after six seasons of blissful distraction, was always a show about utopia. Its titular setting is a rundown town where the Roses, a rich, eccentric family of four, decamp after financial calamity. Theyve lost all their assets except the deed to Schitts Creek, which Johnny Rose, their patriarch, bought for pocket change years before, as a joke. Though it takes the family three years to see it, their new home is nothing short of a haven. Bigotry doesnt seem to exist there. When, in the most recent season, protesters throng the town hall to express their disappointment with Johnnys wife, Moiraa washed-up soap-opera actress who has unwittingly belittled the locals in an interview with Peoplethey carry signs that read That wasnt very nice.

In the five years since Schitts Creek premired, the series has spoiled fans with a surfeit of exquisite character work. Eugene Levy portrayed Johnny with an owlish deadpan, and Catherine OHara, his frequent collaborator on the Canadian sketch circuit, granted Moira a loopy flair, an unplaceable accent, and a gonzo lexicon. Playing Alexis, their socialite daughter, and David, their flamboyant son, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy, who co-created the show with his father, perfected a sibling bond built on caustic histrionics. But beneath the bickering was always a sense of tenderness that, over the seasons, first sustained Schitts Creek and then stifled it. As the clueless, narcissistic Roses found new purpose in their drab environs, the show lost an essential tension and began to feel somewhat like fan fiction, curing its protagonists of the petty miseries that animated them at the start.

One character who never seemed to get a break was Twyla Sands, the plucky, unfussy waitress at the towns seemingly lone restaurant, Caf Tropical. Twyla, who is played by Dan Levys sister, Sarah, occupied a maligned side role, pouring black coffee, scraping freezer burn from mozzarella sticks, and catering to the whims of the Roses and other locals. Unlike Stevie, the acerbic clerk of the towns motel, where the Roses relocate, Twyla is an unparalleled listener, offering sage if strange advice over the buzz of her blender. She infers the Roses orders and withstands their tantrums, hardly flinching when Alexis summons her by throwing a muffin or Moira tries to order miso black cod.

Twylas role didnt demand the hammy virtuosity that powered the series past cutesiness; sometimes the character felt like a throwaway. And yet, beneath her chipper exterior, Twyla was the darkest resident of Schitts Creek. Her best lines were odd non sequiturs that revealed disturbing flashes of family history. Her father, we learn, is a convict. Her mother, who cycled through more than a few abusive lovers, confuses Twyla with her cousin. A deaf relative, who relies on sign language to communicate, traded several of his fingers to pay off a mysterious debt. Most of these disclosures were zany enough to elicit a laugh, or else disclosed, in passing, in the midst of other action. But together they made Twyla a kind of Kimmy Schmidt character, someone who relished the everyday because of what she had survived to reach it. My uncle had a parrot that kept asking me to take my bra off, she blurts out, in the most recent season, when Moira shows their a-capella troupe the trailer to her upcoming film, an apocalyptic thriller about killer crows.

Twyla was never quite a pariahshes too happy and unflappablebut the Roses and the rest of the locals often bonded, obliquely, at her expense, and more than a few episodes revolved around their efforts to improve her. In one episode, Alexis takes Twyla out for a night on the town, and her mother does the makeovers. Twyla lights up at Moiras complimentsThats the nicest thing anyones ever said to menot realizing that they are addressed to Alexis. In another episode, Moira deigns to promote Twylas annual murder-mystery party, which even Jocelyn, the mayors obliging wife, tries to skip. If the central struggle of Schitts Creek was, for the Roses, the indignity of being made mundane, Twyla was the model of finding pride in mundanity and all of the problems it entailed.

One of the shows more satisfying surprises was the friendship that developed, over the seasons, between Alexis and Twyla. The two were always perfect foils, the spoiled socialite and her patient confidante. But they were united, in a subtler sense, by a shared history of maternal neglect. Twylas stories of her own mother evoked a working-class version of Moira, an addled woman preoccupied by personal drama. Twyla was a kind of counterfactual to Alexis, offering a vision of how the latter might have turned out with a little more grit and a lot less money. Sarah Levy was, in this way, a clever casting choice; though she lacks the bushy eyebrows of the men in her family, she always looked enough like a Rose to suggest a kinship with them. In a documentary that aired after the finale, Levy recalls that an early version of the pilot presented a more benighted Twylanerdy and downtrodden, in a constraining cardigan and chunky glasses. There was a sadness to her, she says. But one of the reasons Twyla doesnt recede is that she retains a sense of confidence despite everything. Sarcasm pings off her earnest surface.

Schitts Creek, in its later seasons, always verged on schmaltz, and it ended up settling the fate of each of the Roses a little too neatly. Johnny, who plans to expand the local motel into a franchise, and Moira, who has been cast in a reboot of her fame-making soap opera, take off for California. Alexis parts ways with Ted, her veterinarian boyfriend, and prepares to head to New York. And David, whose wedding to Patrick, his business partner turned soulmate, is the perfect culmination, decides that he will stay put to run his business and settle into the newlywed life. For Twyla, the indignities dont quite subside. She stumbles into an invitation to Davids wedding only by accident. Later, in the penultimate episode, Alexis shows up to the Caf Tropical with a black trash bag filled with old clothes, hoping to pass off some hand-me-downs before moving to New York. Twyla insists on paying for the clothes, over Alexiss objections, and in the process makes a casual disclosure: right around the time the Roses arrived, she lucked into a lottery jackpot of forty-six million dollars.

It turns out that the Roses were not the only residents of Schitts Creek to weather a sudden reversal in fortune at the start of the series. Reflecting on the shows run in a recent interview, Dan Levy attributed Twylas spirit to the secret lottery win; the shows writers, he said, had to find a reason for her hopefulness and optimism. The beauty of Twylas windfall, though, is that it hardly altered her life. If Ive learned anything from how my mom spent the money I gave her, Twyla says when Alexis asks why she hasnt left her job or the town, its that money can buy a lot of snowmobiles, but it cant buy happiness. When, in the end, Twyla comes to wish Alexis farewell, she reveals that she has taken her friends advice to buy herself something nicenot a spa day or a cute little anklet, as Alexis suggests, but the Caf Tropical.

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The Schitts Creek Series Finale: The Vindication of Twyla - The New Yorker