Fox’s Welcome to Flatch opens with a fun fact that might be about you. “Recent studies show that Americans long for a simpler life in small towns,” reads a caption placed over languid shots of farm country, before explaining that the series is a documentary meant to “explore these communities.” The framing can’t help but keep the citizens of the fictional Flatch, Ohio, at a bit of a remove — after all, the assumption is that the viewer is an outsider not just to Flatch but to small-town life itself. But confident world-building, likable cast chemistry and just the teeniest touch of sweetness soon make Flatch feel like home, as familiar and welcoming as your own neighborhood.
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Executive produced by Jenny Bicks, Welcome to Flatch is a remake of the British series This Country. For audiences on this side of the Atlantic, however, the more accessible points of comparison might be Parks & Recreation or Schitt’s Creek with more local oddballs and less sentimentality, or a less stylized Letterkenny minus the deadpan wordplay. Like all of those, but especially the latter, Welcome to Flatch builds its storylines around the comically mundane dramas of an out-of-the-way town filled with quirky personalities.
Welcome to Flatch
Though the community has a population of 1,526 as of the pilot, the series mostly focuses on a small handful of Flatchians, among them dirtbag cousins Kelly (Holmes) and Shrub Mallet (Sam Straley), newcomer reverend Joe (Seann William Scott) and unassuming newspaper editor Cheryl (Aya Cash). Recurring characters like Shrub’s remarkably unremarkable crush Beth (Erin Bowles), weave in and out of different storylines, while the camera follows around mostly on foot — sometimes tripping over the literal holes that its subjects have dug as part of some scheme or another.
Fairly quickly, a vivid picture emerges. Kelly and Shrub are the first characters we see in Welcome to Flatch, and Holmes and Straley embody them so fully from the first seconds — with their matching slouches and smirks, they’re two halves of a hilariously exhausting whole — that it’s almost a surprise to realize they haven’t been playing these roles for years already. The writers prove to have a knack for precise details. When Big Mandy (Krystal Smith) sums up her romantic type as someone who owns “zero cardigans if they’re a woman, lots of cardigans if they’re a man,” it’s an impressively efficient glimpse into her dating life.
That vision of Flatch isn’t entirely an idealized one. As we see in episode after episode, money is short, dating options are slim and everyone is getting on each other’s nerves basically all of the time. The characters aren’t exactly role models, or even very good neighbors: Shrub and Kelly are troublemakers described as “walking disappointments,” Father Joe is better at getting taken advantage of than actually changing lives and Cheryl’s home is pelted with water balloons after she dares to date a man from a rival town.
And occasionally, captions pop up to explain the real-life challenges of places like Flatch, such as the fact that less than 11% of American physicians work in rural areas, leading to long wait times for treatment. On a more sober-minded show, that statistic might lead to anecdotes illustrating the devastating consequences of lack of access to reliable medical care, or impassioned discussions about possible solutions. But super low stakes are key to Welcome to Flatch‘s appeal. Here, that number is just a setup for a funny, featherweight plot about Kelly driving Father Joe up the wall with her histrionics as they wait in urgent care for a doctor to examine her very minor injury.
Indeed, none of the storylines in the seven nonconsecutive episodes sent to critics veer toward politics, controversy or even super strong emotions. Some of its jokes tilt a little sad or sweet — for all of the nonsense Shrub and Kelly subject each other to, they’re two people who really don’t have anyone else, and who really do try to look out for each other in their own imperfect ways. But so far at least, Welcome to Flatch is steering clear of the civic-minded optimism of a Parks & Rec or the heart-tugging warmth of a Schitt’s Creek. Instead, this is the kind of show where Shrub will reluctantly agree to volunteer work by announcing, “I’m not going to like it and I’m not going to learn anything and I will not grow in any way,” and more or less stay true to that declaration.
Which, in its way, also feels like part of the scrappy, low-key fantasy that Welcome to Flatch is spinning. It’s offering a taste of that supposedly simple small-town life without any of the complications, where even the harsher realities just become fodder for goofball schemes or juvenile jokes, and in that sense it’s doing exactly what it sets out to do. Maybe it’s a place you’d really want to live, and maybe it isn’t. But it’s a pretty fun place to relax after a hard day at whatever actual world you live in, one entertaining half-hour at a time.
