Schitt's Creek stars dig into that surprising moment: 'Love is easy, life is hard'

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Schitt's Creek season 6, episode 8, "The Presidential Suite."

"I keep waiting for things to get easier for us," Ted tells Alexis on this week's episode of Schitt's Creek. Sadly, things will never get easier for them. In the eighth episode of the final season, after a long, bumpy road for the once happy couple, both Alexis (Annie Murphy) and Ted (Dustin Milligan) come to the heart-wrenching decision to split up.

"It's bittersweet, but this is how it has to be," Milligan says on the latest edition of the EW On Set podcast.

With David's (Dan Levy) wedding looming, season 6 saw Alexis mistakenly purchase the wrong airline tickets, delaying her trip to meet Ted in the Galapagos Islands. In a later episode, while video-chatting, they decided Alexis shouldn't go to the Galapagos at all; Ted feared the months-long move would only make her miserable. In "The Presidential Suite," Ted returns to Schitt's Creek to see Alexis and relay some worrisome news: He's been offered a permanent dream job in the Galapagos for at least the next three years. The half-hour ends when Alexis and Ted meet for their last private romantic dinner in the cafe as a couple.

"The idea that I felt very strongly about was this notion that love alone is not enough to sustain a relationship," Milligan says. "We want to believe that. We want to believe that once you're in love, then that's the end-all, be-all. But life gets in the way. Love is easy, life is hard. And that's what I think this relationship represents in such a wonderful and realistic way."

According to Murphy, the breakup scene "changed quite a bit from the table read to when we actually shot." The initial script was "Alexis-heavy" until the writers realized "it needed to be more of a dialogue between the two of them because they're two people going through this moment, not just one."

"When we actually shot, it was a really sad scene," she recalls. "It wasn't our very last scene that we shot together, I think it was our second-to-last scene that we shot together. The relationship has come to mean so much to both of us as actors, and we've had so much fun acting with each other and playing these characters that it really was a very sentimental scene for us as people and as actors, and in character as well. The cafe looked so beautiful and the crew was all sad, and it was a really special scene to shoot. And I think the way it was written really serviced the characters."

Listen to the full episode of EW On Set in the player above, or wherever you download and stream podcasts.

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