The Trailer Park Boys canon
More Marathon Man
Our Marathon Man, Andrew Parker, subjects himself to entire canons of Can-Con he missed out on while spending his formative years in the States. He picks something, watches it (or reads it or listens to it) until he gets fed up. Then he writes about it. Easy, right?
Say what you will about how anything is possible in the digital age and how taking a movie along with you on a portable device has become the equivalent of carrying a package of Kleenex, but television shows and films are not like books. Television is episodic by nature, and keeping up with the ever-swelling slew of talked-about TV often requires more discipline than skimming the latest bestseller.
For one reason or another, I missed the boat on Trailer Park Boys (along with most of Lost, Justified, Friday Night Lights, and a handful of other shows that grabbed me at first, but eventually receded back into their weeknight timeslots). I had seen several episodes when Trailer Park Boys aired on Showcase during its run from 2001 to 2008, but aside from laughing at the antics of Sunnyvale Trailer Park residents Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles, my memories of the episodes are extremely hazy. When the show began airing, I was still living in the States and too busy getting drunk on my own at University to be bothered watching others do it. Towards the end of its run, the show seemed too frivolous for someone looking to secure a steady paycheque.
Enter the recently released and mostly complete TPB box set with every season, special, and both films nestled in a “cheeseburger locker” designed to look like the remarkable gut of Sunnyvale’s assistant supervisor, Randy. The seasons themselves are short and seemingly never have the same number of episodes, but the set does add up to a total running time of just under 27 hours including both movies (which had to be included, as I haven’t seen either of them).
Start time: 7 p.m.
7:21 p.m.: With the first season, my memory of the show’s premise comes back to me pretty easily. Julian (John Paul Tremblay) and Ricky (Robb Wells) return home from prison and make their way back to the trailer park (documentary crew in tow) that’s policed by Mr. Lahey (John Dunsworth) and his shirtless assistant, Randy (Patrick Roach). What was unexpected is the effectiveness of the first proper episode. It finds Julian at war with the scumbag named Cyrus who moved into his trailer, and it strikes an interesting balance between comedy, drama, and vérité. For a show that would ostensibly get labelled as a stoner, slacker comedy, the more serious notes of the show are welcome surprises.
8:00 p.m.: While it’s easy to see Julian is the brains of the entire operation, it’s a bit hard to accept that Ricky used to be some sort of weed savant before being reduced to living out of his buddy’s car. Also hard to believe is why anyone would want to be around someone like white boy thug J-Roc (Jonathan Torrens), who reminds me of a Funky Bunch-era Mark Wahlberg. Know’m sayin’?
8:19 p.m.: If I were to turn this into a drinking game, and excluded curse words or weed references, the easiest way to get drunk would be from the number of scenes where Julian looks pensive while listening to Ricky blather endlessly over the answering machine.
8:45 p.m.: Towards the end of the fifth episode and the end of the hour, the show finally travels outside of the trailer park for a scene that takes place at a bank. The scene unfortunately dies a slow and unfunny death, save for Ricky wearing a ridiculous Martin Luther King Jr. hoodie.
8:58 p.m.: As the truncated season one bleeds over into season two, the show starts to show signs of growing pains with a few inconsistencies. Lahey is an interesting character performed exceptionally by Dunsworth, but in the first few seasons he seems to fluctuate wildly between liking the boys being around and wanting to destroy them by any means necessary. The whole Lahey-being-a-drunk angle seems to have been added just to give the character some consistency.
9:08 p.m.: The sentimental nature of the first few seasons also reaches its nadir when the third member of the crew, Bubbles (Mike Smith) has his first big scene. It’s a speech about how people should never be alone, which is simultaneously supposed to solidify Bubbles as someone smarter than his portly frame and Coke bottle glasses suggest, but its accompanied by a tinkling piano and oppressive strings on the soundtrack. That might not ring entirely true to the series, but watching Ricky struggle in his first-ever job as a mall shopping cart attendant does, leading to some of the funniest moments thus far. (Wells should have won a Genie for the best pratfalls—nobody trips and slides down a hill quite as believably.)
10:50 p.m.: A really young, pre-Juno Ellen Page shows up for a nice, heartfelt subplot as Lahey’s daughter who befriends Julian. But most of the plotting for this season seems to come across like The Wire for dummies as the boys try to grow weed out of an Airstream to sell to prison guards. It’s mostly amusing, but nothing really stands out.
11:16 p.m.: The fifth episode of season two, “The Bible Pimp,” is easily the best of the series up to this point. While poking fun at a pair of religious types who come to Sunnyvale to sell overpriced bibles seems like shooting fish in a barrel, the episode contains a dark and creepy vibe that gives Bubbles room to grow as a character. The whole thing ends with a gleefully deranged shootout in a strip club parking lot.
12:27 a.m.: Other than getting progressively annoyed by Ricky’s running knock-knock jokes, I have to wonder what he does in the winter. He’s apparently been living in Julian’s car for four years now, nonstop. Is he always in prison during the winter, or is this an alternate universe where Nova Scotia is just that temperate?
1:51 a.m.: Season three hits a great three-episode run, with the boys operating an illegal gas station out of the park, J-Roc putting out an album full of stolen material, and the now infamous episode with Rush’s Alex Lifeson getting kidnapped by Ricky and Julian to play for Bubbles after getting screwed out of seeing him by an abnormally cruel Lahey and Randy. These episodes stray slightly from the more sentimentally tinged episodes of the first few seasons, but now series creator and director Mike Clattenburg and company are showing consistency with the material.
2:37 a.m.: Watching Lahey snap and think he’s a cop again after accidentally foiling a liquor store robbery serves two great purposes: It establishes Lahey firmly as a villain after the first few seasons played up the gray area between him and the boys, and it offers the first episode of the series that truly revels in darker, almost sadistic humour. Taken on its own, it might seem out of place, but such an episode is necessary to keep the series running.
3:46 a.m.: They haven’t been mentioned much yet, but much like Ricky’s knock-knock jokes, watching Corey and Trevor always screwing up and being looked down upon has become a running gag with precious little payoff. Maybe if the characters were a bit more interesting instead of bland, it would be funnier watching Ricky constantly shake them down for smokes and having Julian put them down every chance he gets.
3:59 a.m.: While there is an appeal of starting every season over with a clean slate, the drastic changes between the season finales and the season openers just come across a little too plainly as Clattenburg trying to create a new series every season. The season openers really aren’t that funny, but the episodes that follow nicely submit to the tone being set.
4:56 a.m.: After some great episodes that find Julian drunk on swish and dancing with a “dirty old dog” behind a donair joint, the resurfacing of Cyrus as a major player, and Bubbles living out his dreams as a backyard wrestler, we come to an episode that makes every other episode pale in comparison. Bubbles suffers an abscessed tooth that needs medical attention, but he refuses to go without the aid of a puppet named Conky. The puppet, thrown out by Ricky long ago, acts as a foul-mouthed surrogate for the usually shy Bubbles in overwhelming situations. Not only is the puppet surreal and hilarious, but Ricky also has to perform the entire episode with a glue-soaked rag affixed to his nose (the fumes from which are making him loopier as the episode continues) and a model truck glued to his hand. It all culminates in the best of the show’s numerous stand-off conclusions between a wasted Ricky and the puppet in a veterinarian’s office, where Julian rightfully has no clue how to mediate the discussion. Everything about the episode works beautifully—especially the throwaway Mike Bullard reference.
6:17 a.m.: Things are starting to get a bit blurry and hazy now. The show has gone back to being a pitch black comedy, with Lahey now strapping C-4 to his chest and the boys kidnapping Rita McNeil and putting her to work on their weed plantation. It feels like an oddly intense and abrupt way to end the season. It’s not a bad episode, but the whole endeavour is far removed from the more sentimental leanings of past season finales.
6:37 a.m.: Starting the fifth season, and only barely hanging on to consciousness. After taking all the money for themselves at the end of season four, Trevor and Corey have lost it all by the start of the next season. Again, it’s an abrupt change (which is starting to grate at this point), and one involving Corey and Trevor (which has always grated). As much admiration as this series has garnered from me, I don’t see myself going much further in this sitting.
Time of termination: Sometime around 8:13 a.m., when the boys make a driveway out of Cyrus’ stolen hash and Ricky burns his dad’s house down. I didn’t stop, but passed out shortly after writing this final note, waking up in the chair to the DVD menu at 11:05 a.m.
Replay value: Moderately high. Trailer Park Boys is unique in that it’s a Canadian series that doesn’t conform to a uniquely Canadian identity. This could have easily taken place in the deep South, and no one would be any wiser (save for all the oots and c’yars). While watching it all in a single sitting might bring to light questions of continuity and overall quality issues, the show holds up to its reputation as one of Canada’s most obscenely funny exports.
