The Arena as Garrison: Shoresy and the Relocation of Survival
Contemporary Canadian Television establishes social proximity and community as the pillar of survival. Shoresy offers a concentrated and theoretical articulation. Canadian shows of the same vein, Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, and The Office Movers, see the distribution of the work of survival across communal settings, namely stores, small towns, and businesses. Shoresy doubles down and intensifies the logic within a singularly structured setting - the hockey arena.
Jared Keeso, creator, reconfigures the lived national experience of these small towns that we saw blueprinted out in earlier Canadian television series. Shoresy relocates the survival model outlined by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood from landscape to institution. As we see in the earlier examples, these shows outline that you need community, and people will find something in common to survive together. Shoresy transforms the garrison from a defensive structure against environmental threat into a system of enforced proximity in which survival depends on sustained cohesion. The show outlines that you need to put the good of the community before yourself in order to survive, and doing so with sincerity means you make it out alive.
In Frye’s theory, the garrison is a response to isolation. Small communities cluster together defensively, surrounded by a landscape that is vast, indifferent, and potentially hostile. The boundary between inside and outside is clearly defined: the garrison protects against what lies beyond it. Frye states the people within the garrison “provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together”. While Frye suggests in this case that inside the garrison, everything meaningful, culture, morality, identity, art, had to be generated from within. There was no outside source to draw from because everything is vast and scary outside the garrison lines. This creates intense internal pressure toward conformity and shared value. I would argue that in the case of Canadian Media in the last few years, the migration into tighter city centres where space is knowable, and the outside isn’t this vast space, survival now comes from a different shared experience, one where we come to know each other, accept each other, and validate each other’s experiences.
Margaret Atwood's theories in Survival deepen the breadth of Shoresy’s place in Canadian media. Where Frye described the spatial logic of the garrison, Atwood named the principle behind it: survival as Canada's central symbol, the overarching myth of the national imagination. Atwood furthers Frye’s ideas - the central Canadian symbol is not the frontier, like America, or the island, as in Britain, but the act of bare survival itself - getting through, enduring, not being destroyed. Atwood further elaborates what she calls "victim positions" - a spectrum running from the denial of victimhood, through passive acceptance, to creative non-victim status. It is precisely this trajectory that Shoresy traces across the series, through the Bulldogs, and himself.
The Sudbury Bulldogs begin the series as a team that has settled into passive victimhood: they are the worst team in the league, their coach doesn't care, the players are indifferent, and, most damningly, as Shoresy will repeat throughout the series, no one hates to lose. They have not just accepted defeat; they have stopped registering it as meaningful. What Shoresy accomplishes, in Atwood's terms, is a movement from unconscious victimhood into active, creative survival, a refusal to be destroyed and also a refusal to be defined by the conditions that created the destruction - in this case, a coach that’s running the team into the ground and a team that’s been defeated 19 games straight.
Within the first episode, we meet the namesake protagonist. He’s discussed as the “dirtiest player in hockey”. Shoresy doesn’t have a first name, he is rude, he “takes a shit before every game and also between every period”, his “stick budget must be stupid” because he breaks a few every game, he comes off as showboating, boastful, and the archetypal masculine hockey player, that is, besides crying at the sound of the Canadian National Anthem.
Shoresy talks to Nat, the general manager, who is ready to fold the team because no one wants to see the worst team in the league play, and convinces her to bring on four veterans from all over Canada to play for the Bulldogs. And luckily, she relents.
In Shoresy, this spatial logic is preserved but reoriented. The arena functions as a rigid and regulated environment, structured by repetition, ritual, and constraint. However, the threat to survival is no longer external. There is no wilderness encroaching on the edges of the narrative, no environmental force that must be resisted. Instead, the pressure is internal, generated by the necessity of maintaining the team as a functioning unit. The locker room, the ice, Nat's office, Shoresy's apartment - these are the garrison's interior. They are not defended against nature, but instead, defended against chaos. This is a crucial evolution in the garrison's logic: the enemy is not outside anymore. It is the absence of care and the absence of sincerity.
The story begins here, and this is what makes it a characteristically Canadian piece of art. The Bulldogs need to survive, and Shoresy brings together a rag-tag group of veteran players with experiences ranging from the NHL to lacrosse, to play “whale shit hockey” for Sudbury. Each uses their own inherent life experience to show up for the team, Sudbury, and each other. The confines of the arena create grounds for a brotherhood among these men, where they learn about each other, grow with each other, and, most importantly, become a team.
Shoresy sits in Nat’s office, where he proceeds to list off what we should expect are a bunch of duds. It’s late in the season, Triple A talent isn’t uprooting their lives to come to Sudbury. We have Brant Goodleaf, Goody, a former Lacrosse top pick and junior A hockey player; Jonathan Diaby, Dolo, a current rapper and a former 3rd round pick who only speaks French; Ted Hitchcock, Hitch, a Newfoundlander who was a former 1st round pick, and Jean-Jacques Francois Jacques-Jean, JJ Frankie JJ, that Shoresy Bobby Clarked previously that’s coming to Sudbury because there’s “an impossible amount of good looking girls in Sudbury”. Along with three Ojibwe Jims - the redundantly named “tough Natives”. While there is history between these men, they come together, agree to live in Shoresy’s apartment with his bird, Big Sexy, and play on the newly branded Blueberry Bulldogs.
While they might not initially make sense together as a group, we see how quickly this “veteran presence” is created. In a vignette, we see Goody watching a girl at the Coulson dancing, the bouncer pushes him back, and we see Hitch and Dolo come up behind him. Smash cut to the bouncer on the floor, splayed out. One more smash cut, and we see Shoresy heading to the ice, the team behind him. Goody and Hitch fistbump before everyone heads on the ice after him. And here, we have a team.
I want to draw focus to the cinematography and the visual storytelling of Shoresy. The use of music-backed vignettes is a key motif of Shoresy. These vignettes - smash cuts with no setup - are almost an indirect tell that this community doesn’t need to be narrated. They move together, and it happens through proximity and shared action. The editing of the show mimics the underlying story; sincere actions need no exposition.
Ahead of their first game as a team, all of these men are motivated by one thing - they want to win, not for individual pride, but for their team, and for each other. Shoresy touts constantly that he hates to lose, and this winning team culture that he cultivates is touted through Sanguinet, a young player turned coach. He’s nervous and goes to Shoresy for some pointers. Shoresy eloquently states, “Alright, we’re teammates, we’re brothers, I’d go to the wall for you, are you, my brother? Would you go to the wall for me? Then you’re allowed to call me a fucking useless cunt on your way there.”
While Frye noted that Garrison Mentality stated that individuals within the confines of the garrison are "compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together" because the community is small and fragile, social cohesion was the goal of survival. You don't break the rules because the rules are holding civilization together against the outside. This explains, for Frye, why Canadian culture tends toward conservatism, rule-following, and didacticism rather than toward the rebellious or individualistic. Shoresy takes this and turns it on its head. Sanguinet is the coach, and while he’s green and looking for assistance for his first game, Shoresy shows him that respect isn’t about bullying, yelling, or intimidation. It’s about mutual respect. If you’re willing to stick your neck out for me like I am for you, you can insult me and call me names, but know that at the end of the day, we’re on the same team.
In the locker room, Shoresy calls out the “useless” vs. the veterans. He gives JJ hell for not being hyped up enough before the game. He tells everyone to block shots and bug Apeldoorns, the members of the opposing team - “everyone knows their role, everyone does their job”. The game starts, and we see the Veterans take on the starting line. Dolo starts with a fight while the veterans look on, and the tone has been set for the rest of the game.
After a few close calls, some aggressive yelling from Shoresy, a broken stick, a few more fights courtesy of the Jims, and the winning goal courtesy of JJ, the Bulldogs win their first game of the season. And while it wasn’t perfect, we’re starting to see these men come together and share moments of joy with each other - a cohesive community. They celebrate with ice cream, a “game stick” in the locker room, listening to Chantel Kreviazuk, calling their parents and sharing their victory.
Shortly after this happens, some of the “useless” that Shoresy dubbed earlier come to Nat’s office, the Goalie in particular, and threaten to leave because he doesn’t like this new cultivation of kinship Shoresy is building. He exits as Nat sides with Shoresy. This turning point marks the cohesiveness of the team - now everyone knows their role, everyone does their part, and everyone will go to the wall for each other.
Sudbury isn’t an incidental choice of setting. Sudbury is a post-industrial Ontario city that has faced its own challenges. Defined by mining and environmental devastation, the city has had its own turnaround. Keeso selected a place that has its own survival narrative, references it in an incredible monologue to the kids he coaches as part of the Blueberry Buddies program in season 4:
Don’t forget where you come from. You’re from the north. You’re from Sudbury. We ain’t pretty and we get dirty. Make fuckin’ sure when they see your number out there, they see your hometown in the program and they say ‘bingo, of course.’ You’re from the home of the smokestacks. You’re from the home of the mines. And you’re from the home of the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs, bitch. Represent.
Sudbury identifies with its own survival, and its residents wear it proudly. Shoresy notes that the city survives by not abandoning what it’s been, but instead from reinvesting in it - and the same is true of Bulldogs. The Garrison shows up with heart and empathy as everyone comes together to create it and reinvest in it. And this creates a ground for brotherhood.
It is worth returning to Shoresy himself and the breakdown of the machismo bravado we were introduced to in the pilot episode. He is presented first as the archetypal masculine hockey player: dirty, brash, showboating, apparently impervious to sentiment. And yet he cries at the Canadian National Anthem, calls his dad all the time, and hugs his team whenever he can. These details are not accidental. It is the key to reading the character correctly. Shoresy's model of leadership is communal vulnerability disguised as bravado. He performs toughness as the exterior within which real care can operate safely.
Later on in the series, after an injury, Shoresy is left without a place to go. He spends the summer coaching some kids, dabbling with his identity not just as a hockey player, but instead, without the Bulldogs and the team he’s cultivated. He remembers what Nat and his girlfriend Laura echo through the season, “When you don’t know where to go, go where you’re needed”. This is the backbone of the series - the sincerity of helping each other be better every day - not to succeed by yourself, or for your own altruism, but instead to succeed together, to live together, to survive together.
His speech to Sanguinet is not just crude advice the first time he takes the ice as coach; it is an emotional disclosure: I will go to the wall for you. The profanity is the armour; the honesty and care are what's underneath. In this, Shoresy mirrors the garrison itself: a hard exterior maintained specifically to protect something fragile and essential within. He is not contradicting Canadian masculinity; he is exposing its structure. The toughness was always in service of the tenderness. Shoresy, then, is not simply a hockey comedy. It is a sustained argument about what Canadian survival looks like when the wilderness is gone, when the landscape is no longer the threat, when the garrison has migrated from the frozen frontier into a hockey arena in northern Ontario. Frye gave us the garrison; Atwood gave us the imperative to survive; Keeso gives us the sincerity. Survival now is internal. It is relational. It depends not on defending against the outside but on maintaining the bonds within the community - across difference, across history, across pride. The Sudbury Bulldogs survive because they choose to show up for each other. That, Shoresy argues, is the most Canadian thing imaginable.
Sudbury matters, but not in the way landscape usually matters in Canadian storytelling. It isn't hostile. It isn't trying to kill anyone. It doesn't demand to be conquered or survived in the Frye sense. It's just there — a container, a set of conditions, the place where everything has to happen. The rink, the Coulson, Nat's office, Shoresy's apartment. These aren't backdrops. They're the whole world of the show, and nobody is getting out of them.
That's the point. You don't leave. Leaving is failure. The veterans came from all over - the NHL, lacrosse, the rap game - and they chose Sudbury. Not because it's glamorous. Because there's a team here that needs them, and you show up for your team. The garrison doesn't have walls anymore. It has an obligation.
The arena is a fixed space, specifically in how little it changes. Practice, game, locker room, Coulson, repeat. There's no climax or championship that resolves everything. Shoresy isn't building toward a moment. It's building toward a way of being together, and that has to be maintained every single day with work and care. Frye and Atwood wrote about survival as endurance, getting through, not being destroyed. That's still what's happening here. The difference is what you're enduring. The wilderness is replaced with people, with each other. The threat isn't starvation or exposure. It's fragmentation. It's the possibility that the team stops functioning as a team.
While the physicality of hockey remains central, violence is not oriented toward domination or conquest. Instead, it functions as a form of regulation within the system, reinforcing roles and maintaining order. And that's why the fighting makes sense. The Jims dropping gloves, Dolo setting the tone in the first game, Shoresy's signature Potty Kiss, none of it is about domination. It's regulation, the system maintaining itself, everyone enforcing the shared commitment to one another. The violence is internal, bounded, and ultimately in service of keeping the whole thing together.
What distinguishes Shoresy most sharply from earlier survival narratives is the way in which it reconfigures the emotional dynamics of endurance. In Frye and Atwood, survival is associated with restraint, silence, and a type of stoicism. Characters endure by containing themselves, by minimizing expression to withstand external pressure. In Shoresy, this logic is inverted. Survival requires expression and honesty, often excessive, repetitive, and relentless. What Frye and Atwood couldn't have anticipated is how loud it would get. In the old survival narratives, you endure by going quiet. You contain yourself. You minimize. In Shoresy, silence is the enemy. You have to talk, constantly — insults, declarations, check-ins, chirps, confessions. The locker room is never quiet. The Coulson is never quiet. Shoresy himself is never quiet. That noise isn't chaos. It's the work. It's how these men stay connected, stay accountable, stay a team. Emotional exposure isn't a weakness in this world. It's the mechanism. You say the thing. You go to the wall. You call your mom after you win.
This shift from restraint to excess does not represent a rejection of survival as a framework, but its adaptation to new conditions. In a context defined by proximity, silence becomes implausible. The constant presence of others demands engagement, and engagement requires expression. Emotional exposure, rather than emotional containment, is how cohesiveness is created and maintained. The risk isn’t that an individual will be overwhelmed by the environment, but that the individual will fail to connect, to communicate, to create and maintain the bonds necessary for survival. In this sense, Shoresy can be read as a contemporary text - one that does not just depict Canadian identity, but rearticulates its structure. By relocating the garrison from landscape to institution, in this case, the arena, and redefining survival in terms of relational endurance, the series extends the frameworks established by Frye and Atwood into a new historical context. It demonstrates that survival remains the organizing principle of Canadian narrative, even as the conditions that give it meaning have fundamentally changed, namely, by seeking connection with honesty and sincerity.
This is what Keeso is really arguing. Frye gave us the garrison. Atwood gave us survival. Shoresy gives us the updated terms: the garrison is a hockey team in northern Ontario, survival is relational, and the way through is not silence but sincerity. The same logic - enclosed space, enforced proximity, the daily work of staying together - shows up across contemporary Canadian television. The arena just makes it visible in its most concentrated form. Whale shit hockey, as it turns out, is a pretty good lens for the national condition.