Letterkenny

Submission 7,632

About

Letterkenny is a Canadian sitcom television series that began as a YouTube web series titled, Letterkenny Problems in 2013 before being commissioned by Crave for TV in February 2016. The show stars Jared Keeso (who created the sitcom) and Nathan Dales as a pair (known for their characters Wayne and Daryl) of friends living in a fictional small town called Letterkenny, Ontario. The town portrayed in the show is loosely based on Keeso’s hometown Listowel, Ontario, despite that there’s an actual ghost town by the show’s same name west of Ottawa. Primarily revolved around the antics of the fictitious residents in the town, the show depicts several types of people living in rural Canada and follows their daily lives as they interact with other residents or out-of-towners.

History

On April 18th, 2013, the first clip from the Letterkenny Problems YouTube channel was uploaded to the page under the title, “A Couple of Jays Fans On: The Early Going.” This is the first short produced for Letterkenny as a part of the web series depicting “two die-hard Jays fans” discussing how the boys are looking out of the gate (seen below).

Shortly after this debut clip, the first true video from the web series was released on the channel May 13th, 2013, with the title “Letterkenny Problems Ep. 1” (below). With a budget of around $10,000 (CAD), Keeso and crew went on to produce several additional episodes in the Letterkenny universe and accumulated millions of views on YouTube before receiving a nomination for Best Web Series at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2014.^[1]

After garnering a significant amount of praise and attention online, including an article from HuffPost^[2], the web series was picked up by Crave (a Canadian video on-demand service) and commissioned as a television series in March 2015. The first video released under the new Letterkenny title (vs. Letterkenny Problems) comes from December 17th, 2015, as “Cold Open,” marking the first example of working with Crave and a change from the web series to television format. The same video also shows the intro style that’s now used on all current episodes of the show.^[3] The first episode officially aired on February 7th, 2016. In 2019, a six episode animated spinoff titled Littlekenny premiered which featured the characters as children.

In 2017, Hulu acquired the rights to the series for the United States where the show’s fan base expanded rapidly. In October that year, Letterkenny was given a production commitment of more than 40 new episodes for future release and the series won the award for Best Comedy Series at the Canadian Screen Awards.^[4]

Online Presence

Around the internet, Letterkenny has had a solid fan base since its launch that has boomed in number and presence since 2013, particularly gaining renown in late 2013 and early 2014 initially. This early growth stems from several online articles covering the first year of the web series that celebrated the show’s ingenuity.

Featured on eBaum’s World on June 28th, 2013, the clip “Hockey Players” from the original web series was posted by the site, receiving nearly 50,000 views, 142 comments and 30 favorites.^[5]

A post on Reddit after the first official episode’s release (stamped December 15th, 2013) to the r/videos sub is one of the earliest mentions on the platform for Letterkenny. Titled, “True Canadian accent,” the post performed admirably with almost 3,000 upvotes and over a thousand comments in the thread (see here).

A subreddit for the show (r/Letterkenny) was founded on August 15th, 2014, and has remained active since the start with over 150,000 members as of January 2020 (over 4,000 more than the Seinfeld sub for reference).^[6]

On Twitter, the official account for the show, which was launched in June 2013, now has over 171,000 followers.^[7] Though the official Twitter remains the largest Letterkenny account on the platform, there have been a number of notable spinoffs, including the Letterkenny Memes account.

With a well-established following around the net, Letterkenny has since become a noteworthy show to quote and create memes from, especially seen on Reddit where users will often reply in threads with snippets from the show’s iconic dialogue. As this has become more frequent, Redditors created the sub r/UnexpectedLetterkenny to document these instances. As of January 2020, the sub has nearly 24,000 subscribers.^[8]