Shout Out / Schitt's Creek

Given Daniel Levy's love of pop culture and his own history as a VJ on MTV, Schitt's Creek contains shout outs and celebrity references nearly every episode.

Season 1

Season 1

• When developing the character of Moira, Catherine O'Hara didn't want her to just be a rich woman in fine suits and pearls. She suggested Moira dress like eccentric socialite Daphne Guinness, who is known for buying wild runway looks from avant-garde designers and wearing them in her daily life. Dan Levy and costume designer Deb Hanson ran with this concept, and eventually Guinness herself tweeted her approval.
• David says he's been to a hunt before, but it was at Elton John's place and more about the brunch. Elton himself mentioned this name-check when he introduced the show at the 2020 Emmys as well as mentioning that Daniel Levy was named after one of his songs.
• In the mid-oughts, Ponzi-type MLM schemes became very popular with the cast members of various American Soap Opera-s. Some actors found this predatory, since fan events often became pitch sessions and this reportedly caused rifts among the cast. Allez Vous, and Moira's awareness of what a scam it is, parallels these events.

Season 2

Season 2

• When Stevie refers to The Blouse Barn as David's first job, he claims that his first job was a Gap Kids campaign. Dan Levy's first job was actually working retail as a clerk at Gap Kids.

Season 3

Season 3

• There's a car in the used car lot that resembles the one Eugene Levy's character in National Lampoon's Vacation sells to the Griswolds.
• Twyla's Roaring Twenties themed party makes light references to the fact that the entire show is an updated Screwball Comedy, which is a genre that was popular in the 20s and 30s.
• Sebastien Raine's exploitative intentions seem to lie somewhere between Diane Arbus and the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens. He wants to make Moira campy at best, grotesque at worst, something which David recognizes immediately and Moira figures out.

Season 4

Season 4

• Dan Levy is a super fan of Beyoncé and so it makes sense that David would think of himself as excelling as a solo artist, just like his idol.
• Moira having been nominated for multiple soap awards but never having won any is a reference to Susan Lucci getting thirteen Daytime Emmy nominations before winning one.
• Patrick's choice to cover Tina Turner's "The Best" during open Mike night was informed by Dan's long time love of the song's lyrics.
• Moira's pitch of a high-end, large-scale art park seems inspired by the Chinati Foundation, a similar facility in rural Marfa, TX, that draws a jet-setting crowd of art collectors and patrons to the small town.
• Dan Levy is also a super fan of Mariah Carey, and so he wrote David as having only ever said I love you to his parents twice and once at a Mariah Carey concert. This leads to the immortal line "You're My Mariah Carey" from Patrick, which the singer herself tweeted out.
• The sad tree that Johnny buys from Ray, and that his family super glues together for the party seems inspired by A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Season 5

Season 5

• Blaine, the fallen hard young director of The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening seems inspired by Josh Trank and his disastrous reboot of The Fantastic Four (2015).
• David and Stevie's road trip to find Emir is inspired by a real life road trip taken by Dan and Emily Hampshire.
• One of Dan Levy's early acting jobs, and one that he is mortified about, was a Lifetime Movie of the Week and the experience inspired Moira to be excited about the rerun of her own opus, Not Without My Cousin.
• David's line about not wanting to play Spin the Bottle with his sister in the circle, refers to the fact that Dan Levy's real-life sister Sarah is in the circle as well as the character Alexis.
• The Baseball Episode was directly inspired by Eugene Levy and Noah Reid being huge Blue Jays fans, as was as Dan Levy having participated in one of Noah's annual baseball games.
• Dan Levy's has said his favorite romantic comedy is Notting Hill, which David has been watching. It was later one of the films Noah and Dan recreated for a series of Entertainment Weekly covers.

Season 6

Season 6

• Interflix, the streaming service that picks up the crows film is an obvious stand-in for Netflix, and the way the film was embraced on social media and became a streaming hit mirrors how an obscure Canadian sitcom found a worldwide audience on the the streamer.
• Both Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman are big fans of the show, and Kidman sought out the cast for pictures and selfies at an event. So she playing Moira's granddaughter on the Sunrise Bay reboot is a shout out to her. She replied to Dan on social media that she would do the reboot.