Needle Drop: When 'Schitt's Creek' Turned Tina Turner's 'The Best' Into a Love Language

Some moments live in dialogue. Others live in silence. But sometimes, it’s the music that leaves the deepest mark. Our ongoing story series Needle Drop looks back at the songs that shaped film and TV: the ones that deepen emotion or make a good scene unforgettable. These are the tracks that make us pause long after the credits roll.

David Rose (Dan Levy) looks mortified before Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid) sings a single note.

By this point in Schitt’s Creek, David has already come a long way from the spoiled, newly broke New Yorker who arrived in a small town with his parents and sister after losing nearly everything. The series follows the Rose family as they rebuild their lives in the one asset they still own—the town of Schitt’s Creek—but its real pleasure comes from watching them become less guarded and ultimately more capable of love.

Mortification is practically David’s resting state in public: wary, sarcastic, overdressed. At Rose Apothecary’s open mic night in Season 4, Episode 6, he seems prepared for mild embarrassment at best and emotional catastrophe at worst. What if his partner can’t carry a tune? Then Patrick plucks his guitar and starts singing Tina Turner's "The Best," his light, “butter-voiced” notes filling the room, and the mood shifts.

It’s not the kind of moment Schitt’s Creek usually reaches for. The show earns its warmth through restraint—through teasing, patience, the occasional truth wrapped in a joke. Grand gestures aren’t really the currency here. So when Patrick takes that little stage, we feel what David feels: a sudden, slightly terrifying burst of concern that the next moment is filled with disaster.

Patrick, until this moment, has read as the sane one—the calm presence beside David’s magnificent neurosis. The performance doesn’t undo that so much as deepens it. Here’s someone brave enough to be a little ridiculous for love.

Part of what makes the moment so disarming is the song Patrick chooses. “The Best,” written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, was first recorded by Bonnie Tyler in 1988 and turned into a signature Tina Turner hit a year later. In Turner’s hands, it’s downright huge: full-bodied, made to reach the far end of an arena. It’s the kind of song that seems to throw its arms open before the chorus even arrives.

Levy, who co-created the series and plays David, told GQ in 2019 he always considered “The Best” one of the “most beautifully written pop songs in history,” even if its tempo can make people miss how profound the lyrics are. His instinct in the scene was to slow the song down, letting Patrick’s version bring the tenderness to the surface.

Reid, a working musician long before Schitt’s Creek came calling, gave the song its stripped-down acoustic shape. What he found was a tempo somewhere between anthem and confession, familiar enough to land, intimate enough to ache. Sung that way, the song becomes less a declaration than a risk. Take it or leave it, Patrick seems to be saying. I’m putting it out there anyway.

David tries to leave it, at least at first, his face moving through anticipatory embarrassment, then confusion, then the slow dawning that Patrick isn’t humiliating him at all. Sure, he’s surprisingly talented, but he’s also loving him, out loud, in public, without apology. The comedy lives in the setup; the emotion lives in the moment David realizes there’s no reason to be embarrassed.

Levy plays the shift with real precision. David isn’t someone who knows how to receive love plainly. Watching the embarrassment give way to awe is what the scene is really about. Patrick is brave here, no question, but David is the one who has to let that gesture in.

That’s why the scene never feels like a simple serenade. Patrick reveals that he can really sing, and the surprise of Reid’s voice is part of that moment’s particular pleasure. But the deeper revelation is emotional: Patrick is telling David, in the gentlest possible way, that he sees him completely and is not embarrassed by the size of his affection. For someone like David, who has spent so much of his life expecting love to arrive with some degree of judgment, that may be the bigger shock.

Then the show lets the song come back.

A few episodes later, David lip-syncs the full Tina Turner version for Patrick: theatrical, completely committed, unmistakably Rose. It’s one of the show’s loveliest full-circle moments: Patrick sang about their love first, in the only way that felt true to him, and David learns, in his own spectacular way, how to give it back.

By the series finale, when the Jazzagals perform “The Best” a cappella at David and Patrick’s wedding, the song has become part of the couple’s story. What began with one man, one guitar, and a room that had no idea what was coming has turned into a shared language: Patrick leading with gentle courage, David answering with a bit of theater, and both of them making the same promise in the only ways they know how.