Series / Son of a Critch

Son of a Critch is a Canadian sitcom airing on CBC (and The CW in the US.) Created by Mark Critch and Tim McAuliffe, it is a semi-autobiographical series based on Critch's childhood in St. John's, Newfoundland in The 80s and inspired by Critch's memoir of the same name.

The cast includes Critch himself as his father Mike, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as a young Mark Critch, and Malcolm McDowell as Pop Critch, the family patriarch.

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This series contains examples of:

• Actor Allusion: In "Growing Pains", Pop recites Rudyard Kipling's "If-" to Mark as a way of subtle way of counseling him about the dangers of trying to grow up too fast. If was also the title of Malcolm McDowell's breakthrough film.
• Abusive Parents: Fox's dad is quite possibly the only person she genuinely fears. In "Cello, I Must Be Going", Mark badgers her into bringing him to her dad's place to recover a cello that her brothers stole from the school, and when they come across Mister Fox, Fox screams at Mark to run as the old man bears down at her. Subverted in season 2, where he seems to have cleaned up his act enough that Suzanne lets him back in her house and Fox contemplates moving with him to a different town after he inherits some land.
• Adaptational Expansion: Mark Critch's memoir is episodic, with each chapter highlighting one day out of each year of his upbringing in Newfoundland with his mother being the most prominently featured family member. The series expands the roles of Critch's brother and father and adds his grandfather, who wasn't mentioned as living with the family in the book, into the mix alongside the rest of the show's recurring and supporting cast.
• Adaptational Personality Change: In his memoir, Critch depicts his mother as being a bit scatterbrained and a Motor Mouth^note when he writes her speaking, he doesn't use any spaces or punctuation and his father as aloof and the two rarely interact^note as Critch describes it, his parents had him later in life and his father apparently behaved as though he'd done enough parenting with Critch's older brother, Mike, Jr., and was hands-off with Mark. In the series, his mother is more measured while his father is more present.
• Affectionate Nickname: The second-season finale reveals what Fox is called at home - Kitten.
• Alliterative Family: Aside from Mark, there's his mother, Mary, his father, Mike, and his brother, Mike, Jr. The exception to this rule is his grandfather, Pop, aka Patrick.
• Anachronism Stew: The pilot takes place explicitly in 1986, but "Royal Visit" features the royal visit of then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana to Newfoundland, which happened in 1983, and "Father Critch" has the local priest implicated in the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, which occurred in 1989.
• Apologetic Attacker: In the first episode, Mark gives Fox his Walkman in order to apologize for making fun of how poor her family is. Fox is genuinely grateful for the gesture, but later tackles him and pretends to steal the Walkman. She leans in close and apologizes for the beating, but says she can't have anyone, especially not her idiot brothers, finding out that she accepted a gift from a victim.
• Attention Whore: Mark is, by his own admission, a practicing narcissist, constantly seeking a stage upon which to perform. In "Cello I Must Be Going", he goes to great lengths to compete in a public-speaking contest (which he loses after deciding to crack jokes about the nuns in order to get laughs), and in "Father Critch", he signs up to become a priest in order to gain the approval of the local priest, oblivious to the fact that Father Moore is a pedophile.
• Bad "Bad Acting": In "Acting Normal", Ritchie is unwittingly given the star role in the Easter play because Sister Margaret dreads the prospect of giving Mark a stage to perform on. Unfortunately for her, Ritchie turns out to be really bad at acting. According to the narrator, Ritchie's performance almost made Sister Margaret doubt the Catholic Church.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The main reason why Ritchie and Fox put up with Mark's eccentricities is because he's actually nice to them.
• Betty and Veronica:
  • In the second episode, Mark finds himself dealing with affections from the fiery Fox and the more reserved Tina. Fox makes the choice somewhat easier for him when she tracks down Tina and threatens her into dumping Mark.
  • In "Reach for the Top", Mark is torn between the still-fiery Fox and nerdy Cara. Again, the choice is ultimately made for him when he discovers that Cara already has a boyfriend.
• Big Damn Hug: In the second-season finale, Mark, Fox, and Ritchie share a group hug as they face the prospect of being separated, as Fox promised her father she would join him in his new home outside St. John's.
• Big Fish in a Bigger Ocean: In the third season, Fox's older brother Silver is finally expelled from St. Bridget's, having gotten too old to continue attending a middle school. Unable to find placement in a high school or secure employment, he ends up trying to parlay his years of experience as St. Bridget's worst bully into some sort of criminal venture, but ends up in jail because it turns out that it's a lot harder to intimidate a cop than it is to intimidate teachers or kids.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Foxes are a sprawling clan of louts and hooligans spread out over the entire publicly-funded Catholic school system of St. John's. According to the narrator, the family matriarch, Suzanne, has been married several times and produced at least one child per marriage. In "You're Dead After School" it turns out that they also claim Mark as one of them, giving him protection from Millard McGinty.
• Boring, but Practical: The main thing that keeps the Critch family just above the poverty line is that Mike Sr. and Mary are both extremely practical, never spending more money than they have to and never taking risks. This is in sharp contrast to Mike's brother Brendan, who appears to have an exciting life but is also living and working out of his car most of the time.
• Brand X: In "Go Into the Light", Mark craves a Gemini Gaming System, which looks suspiciously like a Sega Master System.
• Comet of Doom: The second-season finale takes place against the backdrop of the 1986 passage of Halley's Comet and the nuclear disarmament talks between the United States and Russia. As Mike Sr. and Pop worry about Reagan starting a nuclear war, Sister Rose is whipping up her students about the possible End Times, Mary is fretting about the loss of the blueberry bushes near the family's house, and Mark, Ritchie, and Fox face the possibility that they may be separated after Fox's dad demands that she move with him to her grandfather's old place. This culminates in Mark having a nightmare in which the US and Russia launch nukes at Halley's Comet, setting it on a collision course with his house as Fox counts down to his death.
• Composite Character: The Foxes seen on the show are a mix-and-match of various real Foxes Critch interacted with in his youth^note in his book, Critch depicts the Foxes as being virtually interchangeable with one another as well as other real bullies.
• Confidentiality Betrayal: In "Details are Scanty", Fox reluctantly tells Mark that her father is the "Beef Bandit" who got arrested while trying to smuggle a load of stolen meats and cheeses in his pants because his dad is set to announce the arraignment live on the radio and Fox dreads the prospect that her classmates will all find out about it. She asks Mark to convince his dad not to report on the arraignment but forbids him to tell anyone else about her dad. To his credit, Mark manages to keep their classmates from finding out the true identity of the Beef Bandit, but he accidentally reveals the information to his mom and his grandfather, and Fox thus wonders who else he told. She does forgive him at the end when Mike Sr. declines to reveal her dad's identity on the air.
• Cooldown Hug:
  • In "Circus", Fox pulls Mark onto a Ferris wheel, not realizing that he's scared of heights. As he heads into a full-blown panic attack, she puts her hand on his and then kisses him to get him to calm down.
  • In "Halley's Comet", Pop pulls Mark into a hug after the latter is having a panic attack after a really bad dream.
• Cool Uncle: Deconstructed with Uncle Brendan, Mike Sr.'s brother. Mike Jr. idolizes him, seeing him as a free spirit who lives life on his terms. In reality, Brendan's a charismatic ne'er-do-well who's been exploiting Pop's favoritism for years for money to keep him afloat.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Pop lost his father at an early age, had to drop out of school to work in order to support his family, had a fling with Sister Rose that ended when she took her vows, and spent some time as a bootlegger before eventually settling down and marrying. In "Father Critch", it's also hinted that he was molested by a priest when he was young.
  • "Family Tree" reveals that Mary's mother walked out on her and her father when she was young, left the Catholic Church, and remarried.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: In "Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Dead", Mark falls in love with Tina, the niece of a dead local gangster. His mother is not at all pleased with this, even though it's abundantly clear that Tina isn't involved with her uncle's crimes.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • The nuns at Mark's school still employ corporal punishment; in theory, it's been outlawed, but the nuns simply ignore this. In the first episode, Fox repeatedly takes a strap to the hand from the principal, simply because she's a Fox.
  • In "Royal Visit", a number of characters are very openly anti-British, as one might expect considering that St. John's is a very Catholic town with deep Irish roots, and The Troubles were still going on back then. This may also have played a role in why Mark's mom has such an irrational dislike for Tina, Mark's erstwhile girlfriend in the second episode; Tina's family is English, whereas Mary's family is Irish.
  • In "Father Critch", the local church's reaction to the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal is to shamelessly deny that anything is wrong, even as reports keep circulating in the news about the abuses there.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: In "Merry Critch-mas", Mark and Ritchie discover that Fox's family is one of the recipients of the charity hampers and abuse their positions as distributors for the hampers to make sure Fox's family gets the best gifts. This infuriates Fox when she finds out, as she didn't want anyone to know that her family was on the list.
• Dying Reconciliation: In "Thanksgiving", Leo Critch, Pop's estranged brother, suddenly returns to Newfoundland after two decades away, hoping to meet his two great-nephews and make peace with Pop. As Pop and Leo have barely spoken to each other since Pop abandoned Leo in New York City decades ago, Pop is curious as to why his brother suddenly wants to talk to him now. After much cajoling, Leo reveals that he's been diagnosed with cancer, and doesn't expect to survive much longer, and thus he wanted to make peace with his brother before he died.
• '80s Hair: In "Who Dares Dare Hudaro?", Fox allows her mother to give her a makeover for school picture day, in the hopes that this will entice her mother to buy copies of her photo so she can trade them with Mark and Ritchie. Consequently, Fox shows up for the picture with huge eighties hair and heavy makeup, which makes her stand out terribly among her more conservatively-dressed classmates.
• Embarrassing Hobby: Mark is a secret monarchist, and is in fact the youngest member of the local Monarchist Society, which is a bit of a problem for him socially, as St. John's is a staunchly Catholic town where many of the locals are descended from Irish settlers who were persecuted by the British.
• Ends with a Smile: The first season ends with Mark reclining with a contented smile on his face as he listens to the Mixtape of Love that Fox gave him before they parted for the summer.
• Enemy Mine/Even Evil Has Standards: In "You're Dead After School", Silver and Middle Fox call a truce with Mark because the new bully, Millard, is after all of them because Fox dumped him.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: For all that the Fox boys act like louts and jackasses, in "Halley's Comet", when Mr. Fox tries to lure them to join him in his new home with promises of their own rooms, they all rally around Suzanne, as they all know that she's the one who's taken care of them. Only their sister defects, and only because she fears her dad would not survive on his own.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: In the first season finale, Mark's father and grandfather are both seized by fears of financial ruin (as Mike Sr. has heard a rumor that his radio show is being replaced with a music program while Pop is paranoid about the government's plans to replace dollar banknotes with dollar coins.) Consequently, both behave erratically, with Pop trying to hoard dollar banknotes while Mike Sr. tries desperately to get caught up on the latest music trends in the hopes of becoming a disc jockey.
• Fiery Redhead: Deconstructed with Fox, who seems like the stereotypical hotblooded ginger, but this is in part a mask to protect herself from a school where she's a hereditary pariah because of her older brothers' misbehavior.
• First Kiss: In "Lordy Lordy, Look Who's Dead", Mark wins his first kiss on the cheek from Tina for comforting her at her uncle's funeral. In "Circus", Fox gives him his first kiss on the lips to apologize for dragging him onto a Ferris wheel, having not realized that he's scared of heights.
• First Period Panic: In "Go Into the Light", Fox gets her first period during a class trip to the pool. As the only adult nearby is Sister Rose and she doesn't want to deal with her, she resorts to asking Tina for help.
• Forbidden Fruit: In his youth, Pop pursued Sister Rose back when she was still a novitiate. In "Cello, I Must Be Going", he manages to tempt her into making another go at a relationship despite her vows, but Fox interrupts them.
• Friendship Bribe: A variation. Fox, who comes from a long line of school bullies, steals snacks off of Mark and Richie (her "nerd tax") as a pretense to hang around them without her brothers thinking that she's getting soft. For their part, Mark and Richie always make sure that there is an extra bag of chips for her to steal.
• Frustrating Lie: In "Old Friends, New Friends", Mark and Ritchie are selected for a regional science fair based on a project that Ritchie's dad built for them, which also leads to them befriending (and becoming smitten with) a pair of Protestant girls from another school, which in turn leads to them pretending to be socially-conscious Protestant boys in an attempt to impress the girls. Fox gets increasingly irritated by her friends' bullshitting and eventually exposes their lies in front of the Protestant girls.
• Gender Flip: In Critch's memoir, he only ever interacted with male Foxes, including the one he went to school with. In the series, that Fox is a girl, leading to some romantic undertones to their interactions.
• Given Name Reveal: The third season finale reveals that Fox's first name is Jennifer.
• Granola Girl: In "Old Friends, New Friends", Mark falls for a nerdy girl who spends her free time protesting for social justice causes. He tries to pretend that he's similarly inclined, but a jealous Fox exposes him.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • In "Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Dead", Fox does not take it well at all when Mark falls in love with another girl, Tina.
  • In "Save the Last Dance for Me", Fox bullies Ritchie into tutoring her in math, but forbids him to tell anyone, and thus Mark thinks Ritchie and Fox are dating because they're always hanging out without him, which he really does not take well.
  • Subverted in "Old Friends, New Friends", where Fox gets terribly jealous when Mark and Ritchie start hanging out with a pair of Protestant girls. She sabotages their attempt to fit in with the Protestants repeatedly, but ultimately apologizes, admitting to Mark that she felt threatened because it's so hard for her to make friends and she was afraid that Mark and Ritchie might forget about her.
• Hidden Depths: Fox is terrible at most of her classes, but has demonstrated various useful skills including researching genealogy and speaking French.
• Historical In-Joke: One of Mary's worries about Mark having a crush on a Protestant girl is that it could lead to a mixed marriage and where would their kids go to school; at the time Newfoundland had always had government-funded religious schools, only, until in 1997(!) they were taken over from the churches and a new, nonsectarian public school system established - which both of real-life Mark Critch's sons went to (although many schools retain their old names).
• Identically Named Group: The Foxes are an entire family where each member is just called "Fox". The closed captioning assigns some of them extra names so that you can tell them apart (like "Middle Fox" or "Silver Fox".) The only characters from that family with a proper name are Suzanne, the family's matriarch, and Mr. Fox, whose first name is eventually revealed to be Greg at the end of season 2.
• Insane Troll Logic: In "Merry Critch-Mas", Sister Rose delivers a bizarre diatribe on how people who say "X-Mas" instead of "Christmas" are effectively crucifying Christ, because the "X" resembles a sideways cross. Even Sister Margaret is baffled by this.
  Sister Margaret: Thank you, Sister Rose. I'm sure there was a point somewhere in there.
• Insulting from Behind the Language Barrier: St. Bridget's does not have an actual French teacher, and thus Principal Sister Rose took the job, despite not actually speaking French herself. Fox became the class' most proficient French speaker for the sole purpose of being able to insult the principal to her face without her realizing it.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: The Fox brothers keep trying to bully Ritchie based on his Filipino heritage, but being morons, their insults keep referencing stereotypes about the Chinese or the Japanese, much to his annoyance.
  Narrator: The Foxes' inability to properly bully Ritchie was a stunning indictment of the Catholic school geography program.
• Large Ham: Mark constantly over-acts. He inherited this from his dad, who has a gift for exaggerating the mundane local news, making every minor car crash or moose encounter sound like a matter of life or death.
• Mistaken for Insane: In "Old Friends, New Friends", Pop starts hanging out at a retirement home in the hopes of wooing an attractive widow and getting free meals. During one such visit, he stays for too long and the staff mistake him for a resident. Not helping things is when he vigorously insists that his son is the man on the radio.
• Mix Tape Of Love: Season 1 ends with Fox insistently returning the Walkman she "stole" from Mark way back in the first episode, despite his insistence that he doesn't need it anymore. At the end of the episode, he opens the Walkman up to find that Fox left him a mixtape cued up to "Your Wildest Dreams" by The Moody Blues, in which the singer asks if the person he loves still thinks about him.
• Mutual Pining: It becomes increasingly obvious as the series continues that Mark and Fox have feelings for one another, but Fox is too stubborn to admit that she loves the dorky Mark, and Mark doesn't dare make the first move because he's afraid Fox won't hang out with him anymore if it turns out that she doesn't love him back.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In "Reach for the Top", game show host Bill Tilley is likely a stand-in for Bill Paul, who hosted ''Reach for the Top" back in the eighties.
• No Name Given: All members of the Fox family are addressed as "Fox" with no first name provided.
• Not So Above It All: In "Father Critch", Sister Margaret, normally one of the most straight-laced nuns at the school, cheerfully plays the guitar and sings along when the new priest, Father Garcia, starts singing "Spirit in the Sky". In season 2, she ends up leaving the sisterhood and becoming a secular teacher, Ms. Fowler.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Fox is actually very smart, but has been pretending to be stupid for years. When Mark calls her out on this in "European Vacation", she confesses that because of her brothers' terrible behavior, every teacher she's ever had has accused her of cheating when she actually did well in class, so she just stopped trying to impress them.
• Odd Friendship: Mary, the dutiful (albeit hot-tempered) housewife is quite friendly with Suzanne, the tough and shamelessly-promiscuous Fox family matriarch.
• Only Sane Man: Sister Margaret often serves as the more level-headed sidekick to the fanatical Sister Rose.
• Out of Focus: In season 2, Ritchie plays a less prominent role, as the episodes focus more on Mark's burgeoning relationship with Fox. His absences are explained as a result of him hanging out with skateboarders at school; Mark doesn't know the first thing about skateboards.
• Pedophile Priest: "Father Critch" takes place amid the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal of 1989. Mark is unwittingly pulled into it because his confirmation sponsor, Father Morris, is strongly implied to be part of the Christian Brothers, and eventually gets Reassigned to Antarctica.
• Period Shaming: Among Fox's many acts of bullying was spreading a rumor that one of her classmates, Tina, was on her period.
• Pop-Culture Isolation: The Critch family is rather conservative, and thus Mark has very little exposure to modern culture, even though it's the 80's. He still thinks the Rat Pack are the world's greatest band, and thinks that Bob Hope is the height of comedy. In "Cello, I Must Be Going", he's appalled when Fox introduces him to the comedy of Eddie Murphy.
• Potty Emergency: In "You're Full of It", Mark desperately needs to pee, but a string of mishaps (the toilet being clogged at home, Fox stopping him for advice, Sister Perpetua refusing to give him a hall pass, etc.) forces him to wait until he finally gets home from school.
• Redheads Are Ravishing: As the series goes on, Mark becomes infatuated with the redheaded Fox.
• Roadkill for Dinner: The Critch family resorts to eating a moose that got fatally hit by a car near their house, because it was free meat and all they had to do was drag it back to the house and carve it up.
• Serious Business: In "Reach for the Top", Mark, Fox, Ritchie, and Tina are selected to compete on Reach for the Top. As they are competing against a team from the Protestant Cashin Academy, Sister Rose naturally encourages them to take things way too seriously.
• Sleep Cute: "European Trip" ends with Mark and Fox falling asleep on the bus against each other.
• Slumber Party: In "Cucumber Slumber", Ritchie and Fox invite themselves over to Mark's house - Ritchie because he mistakenly believes that Mark's family is rich, and Fox ostensibly because she wants to find new material to blackmail him with. Mark spends much of the episode trying to hide his family's various eccentricities. Later, he goes over to Ritchie's house.
  • In the season 2 episode "The Perfect Storm", Ritchie sleeps over at Mark's house during a major storm.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: In "Circus", Mrs. Perez becomes concerned that Ritchie is losing touch with his Filipino heritage and forbids him from hanging out with Mark and Fox, instead pushing him to hang out with some newly-arrived kababayan. Ritchie is mortified, as the newcomers don't speak English, have no understanding of local pop culture, and are rude to him.
• Stupid Evil: The Foxes are incredibly prolific at wrongdoing, but they're not especially competent; one episode has them steal a cello from the school and then try to pawn it. Even Mark's Fox doesn't really think through her schemes; in "Candyland", she openly boasts about how she'll tail Mark and Ritchie all night while they're trick-or-treating and then steal all their candy at the end of the night, to which Ritchie responds by pointing out that it would be much easier and less time-consuming to just go trick-or-treating with them.
• The Talk: In "Airing Out", Mark is forced to endure multiple lectures about sex after getting caught with a porno magazine - first from his father, then from his mother, and finally from Father Garcia. Unfortunately, his father is clueless, his mother terrifies him so badly he dissociates, and Father Garcia's lecture is just him rambling on about his escapades before he joined the priesthood. By the end of it, Mark is no closer to understanding sex than he was before.
• Tastes Like Friendship: In the pilot, Mark and Ritchie first bond when Mark sacrifices his lunch to lure the Fox brothers away from Ritchie, and a grateful Ritchie shares his lunch with him.
• Technician Versus Performer: In "Circus", Mrs. Perez forbids Ritchie and Mark from working on their Filipino heritage project together, as she fears (not entirely unjustly) that Mark will dominate the project and deliver an inaccurate report on the Philippines. Consequently, Ritchie does the presentation himself, while Mark does a presentation on Newfoundland. While Ritchie's presentation is more informative, it's also dull and inaccessible to Ritchie's white classmates, who have no context for the information he tries to present. On the other hand, while Mark's presentation is light on actual facts, he is able to get the whole class excited by performing the old Newfoundland anthem, with Pop and his band playing on accompaniment.
• This Is Going to Be Huge: In "Cucumber Slumber", the local government tries to introduce cucumbers to Newfoundland, and Mike Sr. gets onboard, because the growers have bought advertising on VOCM. These efforts end in disaster, as the cucumbers don't have enough flavor, cost too much to grow, and have a tendency to explode if you try to put them in a jar or a can.
• Tough Room: Mark's attempts at comedy tend to fall flat with his classmates, mainly because nearly all of his material is cribbed from old Bob Hope routines. Eventually, he tries improvising his own material, but this does not go over well with the nuns, who become the targets of his jokes.
• Turned Off By The Jerkass: In the second-season premiere, Fox is dating an older boy, Millard. She puts up with a lot of his controlling behavior, even after he tries to "claim" her by tying a piece of fringe from his jacket around her wrist, but she dumps him soon after he threatens and belittles Mark, as while she was willing to put up with a lot of his behavior towards her, she won't tolerate towards her friends.
• Unperson: In "Family Tree", Mark is trying to compile a family tree for his class, but can't find any records of his maternal grandmother. Ultimately, he discovers that his maternal grandmother walked out on his mother, left the Catholic Church, and remarried a Protestant. Mary never forgave her for the pain she caused her, and cut her out of the family.
• Vocal Evolution: Mark and Ritchie's voices dropped considerably between seasons two and three due to their respective actors reaching puberty.
  • After three seasons of Ainsworth playing Mark with a General North American accent that could be from Toronto or LA, presumably taking his cues from the other kids in the show who are from St. John's rather than what a Gen X'er there would've had at that age, in Cabaret, Mark starts codeswitching into a more distinctly Newfoundland accent which gets stronger still in imitation of Mike Sr and Pop. The real Mark Critch does indeed perform in a Newfie'er accent than he uses conversationally in interviews.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Fox secretly craves her mother's approval.
• White-Collar Crime: In "Acting Normal", Mary discovers that Pop has been hiding the fact that his wife is dead in order to continue receiving her pension checks and gets roped into helping him continue the fraud so that he doesn't go to jail.
• The Whitest Black Guy: Ritchie has spent most of his life in Newfoundland, and consequently, has assimilated heavily to the mostly-Irish culture. In "Circus", his mother tries to force him to hang out with some newly-arrived kababayan from the Philippines, and he hates it because they are rude to him, comparing him to a spit-roasted pig - brown on the outside, but white inside.
• Women Are Wiser: The Fox brothers, Silver and Middle, are idiots, but their younger sister, who's just called Fox, has enough wiles to actually torment Mark until he manages to give her a taste of her own medicine by publicly taunting her over her family's poverty.