Image via CBC Television
Published Jan 30, 2026, 6:35 PM EST
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
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At a time when TV sitcoms trained women to apologize for taking up space, Catherine O’Hara showed up on Schitt’s Creek determined to soak up the spotlight. Her former soap star turned impoverished family matriarch Moira Rose was loud, vain, overly dramatic, draped in ever-changing wigs, and often begging for a good coma. On a show that’s remembered (correctly) as cozy, gentle, and almost aggressively nice, she was deeply uninterested in becoming more relatable. Over the course of six seasons, her headpieces grew more ornate, her linguistically eccentric monologues more ungovernable, and her belief that she was destined for a life far removed from a roadside motel with leaky pipes utterly unwavering. She stayed prickly and proud, growing more open-minded, but never truly soft-hearted, and yet, somehow, she’s the reason the show’s reputation for sentimental kindness works at all.
By refusing to smooth down her edges, by refusing to shrink for others’ comfort, Moira (and O’Hara by default) became a blueprint for unrepentant selfhood on television. She was “too much” at a time when female characters were just testing the waters of that particular archetype. And she’s the kind of role model we need now more than ever.
What makes Moira Rose so endlessly watchable – even when she’s being, by any normal metric, terrible – is that she’s confident without ever really being cruel. O’Hara’s secret weapon is playing delusion rather than superiority. Yes, on occasion, Moira looks around at her crumbling sanctuary and says, out loud, that she’s better than everyone else here, but she also claims to be the ingénue of “Andy Webber” and brags about once hosting the non-televised portion of the People’s Choice Awards. This is a woman blissfully detached from reality. And it’s that warped worldview, one that centers her while minimizing everyone else in her orbit, that’s so deliciously fun to watch. She melts down over lost leather handbags and misplaced wigs. She quarantines her family while recalling the horrors of watching a maid froth at the mouth while riding a water taxi; she pops pills like candy, balks at even the slightest hint of a maternal instinct, fails at teaching her children basic life skills, and worries that hoarding basic headache medication might land her in prison. She’s ridiculous, absolutely absurd, high camp in human form, and aspirational in a way that defies logic.
And the trick to pulling that off? O’Hara, a comedian who cut her teeth in the sketch comedy world and knows how to pair sincerity with silliness. In her hands, the joke was always Moira’s worldview, never the people around her. Even when she’s infuriatingly oblivious or self-absorbed, the humor lands because it comes from the integrity of her delusion, not disdain for others. We laugh with her, occasionally cringe, and ultimately admire a woman who has refused to make herself small, even when her circumstances demand that she do so – a woman whose drama is entirely her own and entirely mesmerizing. That stubborn refusal is what allows Schitt’s Creek’s emotional beats to remain authentic. This was a show that gave an entire generation an easily understood way of explaining their sexual preferences. (It’s all about the wine, not the label.) And as the seasons went on, more and more screen time was given to storylines that were inclusive, illuminating, and often educational. The storytelling scales could’ve easily tipped too far into the saccharine and sanctimonious.
As much as we love seeing Queer characters get their happy endings and young women putting personal fulfillment over societal pressure to settle down, all that joy needed a counterweight, something to remind us that the family of elitist weirdos we started our journey with was there, seasons later. Moira turned injected scenes that could have easily drifted into schmaltz – town celebrations, family speeches, really any moment threatening to become a Hallmark card, with needed chaos. Her operatic reactions and awkward brushes with motherhood, friendship, and other forms of social interaction forced the show to work harder for its tenderness. Growth in Moira is always sideways – an adjustment, not a full transformation, and that, in itself, is comforting. The notion that evolution doesn’t always require rejecting the flawed, shallow parts of yourself.
The Evolution of Catherine O’Hara
Moira Rose is the ultimate study in calibrated excess: everything she does is deliberately, extravagantly over-the-top. Her wigs aren’t disguises; they are moods, emotional armor, and occasionally best friends – extensions of her identity that she can slip into depending on what the day demands. Her voice and diction work the same way. That archaic, phonetically unstable accent, the overstuffed vocabulary, the dramatic pauses, they’re not just funny, they’re defensive, a way to control the room and put a little distance between herself and a world she doesn’t fully trust or think she belongs to.
Seen in context, Moira Rose is the culmination of everything Catherine O’Hara has ever done: the self-assured bravado of Beetlejuice, the oblivious survival instincts in Home Alone, the Christopher Guest films, the sketch comedy work… it’s all distilled into one character who trusts her own volume and control completely. Plenty of eccentric characters have followed in her wake, but few are as unapologetic and yet never careless, funny yet never so desperate to earn a laugh that they cut someone else down for it. Moira Rose made the case for vanity, camp, and theatricality – particularly for women who are constantly told it’s time to age out of such things – and Schitt’s Creek didn’t succeed despite her. It succeeded because O’Hara was determined to make her character as fearless, funny, and unforgettable as herself.
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