LOS ANGELES — Up with “Schitt’s Creek!”
The small show about a rich fish-out-of-water family left with nothing but a small town reached the Emmy big time on Sunday night, taking the coveted trophy for best comedy series.
The Canadian sitcom swept the comedy categories, winning seven Emmys for its sixth and final season.
Eugene Levy won best actor, Catherine O’Hara won best actress, Annie Murphy won best supporting actress, and Levy’s son, Dan Levy, claimed three: for best supporting actor, writing and directing.
They were the first seven Emmys handed out at Sunday’s unusual ceremony, and the gleeful, tearful cast was jubilant in their face masks and formalwear as they claimed Emmy after Emmy together at a Canadian pavilion.
“Our show is about the transformational effects of love and acceptance, and that is something that we need more of now than we have ever needed before,” Dan Levy said as he took the seventh trophy.
Dan and Eugene Levy created the show that aired in the U.S. on Pop TV.
Dan Levy thanked his father and O'Hara for teaching an extended “master class” in comedy.
Eugene Levy rode up “Schitt’s Creek” to his first acting Emmy.
O’Hara got the acting Emmy after 45 years of nothing-but-funny and a six-year run on the show. She won the Emmy Award for best actress in a TV comedy for her role as Rose family matriarch Moira.
“Though these are the strangest of days, may you have as much joy being holed up in a room or two with your family as I had with my dear Roses,” O'Hara said, surrounded in a decorated room by mask-wearing co-stars who play the Rose family members.
“It’s kind of ironical that the straightest role I’ve ever played lands me an Emmy for a comedy performance. So now I seriously have to question what I’ve been doing for the past 50 years,” said Eugene Levy, taking home the trophy for the sixth and final season of the show.
Jennifer Aniston presented the award to O'Hara, the first handed out at Sunday night’s ceremony, from Staples Center.
A man in a black tie hazard suit handed her the trophy.
The win puts O’Hara in the elite company that her peers and co-stars have already held her in for decades.
Past winners of the award include Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Candice Bergen and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
O’Hara had one previous Emmy for writing on “SCTV” in 1982 in the earlier days of years of collaboration with Eugene Levy.