Preliminary Reflections on Trailer Park Boys

By Jon Cogburn

One of Netflix's noblest services is introducing the Canadian mockumentary series Trailer Park Boys to an American audience, and then commissioning new seasons (eight through ten taking place in the park, with an extra eight episodes covering the three protagonist's European trip just out last month; an eleventh has been filmed but there is no word when it is being released). The show was one of the first mockumentaries without a laugh track. If you include the short films upon which it is based, it predates the British Office (July, 2001) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (October, 2000), which is not a mockumentary but was one of the first successful television comedies to eschew the laugh-track. The first season of Trailer Park Boys came out in 2001 though.

The show initially chronicles the failures of two criminals (theft and marijuana growing) and the destructive impact they have on Sunnyvale Trailer Park. In the first series they have just gotten out of jail and Julian is committed to getting his life together while his earlier partner in crime Ricky is too incompetent to even attempt that. Julian tries to avoid Ricky, but before long Ricky is sleeping in Julian's car and they are best friends again. A recurring pattern of the show has them on the cusp of a big criminal success at the end of each season, only to end up with some combination of the protagonists in jail, then the next season beginning with them getting out of jail. The repetition is humorous, and as the seasons proceed the schemes involve more and more money and the manner of their failures become more and more Byzantine. Julian presents himself and is regarded as the smarter, more responsible, one. He's always reassuring people that everything is going to be OK. But it is usually his plans that go so awry. He is also always holding a rum and coke, no matter what he's doing. There's no "Best of Julian" reel on youtube, but here are some scenes of Julian receiving phone messages (NSFW) from one of the major subplots of the first few seasons, where Julian schemes to get Ricky and Lucy back together. One of the wonderful things is that over the course of the ten seasons there are little hints that Julian might in fact be the biological father of Ricky and Lucy's daughter Trinity, but the show never reveals the truth. Good shows do this kind of thing in a way that give you a sense of the fictional world being like the actual one in the sense of the executant reality not being filmed or viewed.

Anyhow, this gives you an idea how how his friends expect him to straighten their lives out as well as actor John Paul Tremblay's gifts at conveying emotions via facial expressions. It doesn't illustrate his scheming, the speeches he gives to calm people down when the schemes go awry, or how humorous it is that he never relinquishes his rum and coke.

The second member of the triumvirate, Ricky, is almost all id; he usually just wants to get drunk and stoned, and sometimes he's trying to get back together with his girlfriend Lucy and doing a very bad job of helping her parent their daughter Trinity. What makes him bearable as a character is the combination of his massive incompetence and the fact that he does seem to genuinely care about his friends and daughter. His malapropisms and egg-corns are brilliant. If you go a little under two minutes into this (VERY NSFW) video the malapropisms begin:

At some point in the early season, the third member, Bubbles, started getting more and more screen time. Bubbles lives in a shed in the trailer park and gets money by stealing usually broken shopping carts, fixing them, and then selling them to other shopping centers. Though he supports himself with crime, he is the moral center of the show, and almost always unwittingly pulled into Ricky and Julian's plans. One of the interesting things about Bubbles is that he has some of the affects we associate with autism, but the show never plays that for laughs. Also, Bubbles isn't presented as an unfeeling automaton, but as the most caring person in the show, at least with respect to his friendship with Julian and Ricky and the trailer park cats that he takes care of.

My friends and co-translators (French) Christopher and Abigail RayAlexander and I are obsessed with this show and convinced that it can only be understood as a send-up of mythological themes connected with the way the strange 19th century German Romantic appropriation of Greek culture led to Hegel's stories about the family and state. On this interpretation Ricky represents Nature, Bubbles Spirit, and Julian Culture. The ultimate failure of every one of Julian's schemes works to rebut progressive historical narratives about the culture mediating nature and spirit.

Another mythic trope concerns the boys' relation with the alcoholic Trailer Park Supervisor Jim Lahey who is one of the main dramatic foils of the triumvirate, trying to get them thrown out of the park and/or incarcerated. The evolution of their relationship with him suggests other mythological motifs. Lahey is a father figure who in Season 9 is finally expelled from the park by Julian who himself is finally able to purchase the park, ultimately to everyone's detriment. I can't go into how the father/son motifs (including Chronos/Zeus) recapitulate and undermine themes from Greek mythology without putting in major spoilers. I also think that it is far more clear that the show's writers are conscious of these tropes than the Hegelian ones, as Lahey's drunken rambling sometimes actually references Greek mythology and tragedy in odd ways.

The actor who plays Lahey, John Dunsworth, is masterful at portraying a certain kind of alcoholism, and one of the rewarding things about the show is how sad it ultimately becomes. Here's a youtube reel of him being drunk. If you've ever had a close friend who reliably gets this drunk, then the sense of deja vu is overpowering. The dramatically knocking things over, the paradoxical ballet of the drunk stumble, the sort of automotive way the body keeps doing things when so inhibited, the slurs, the verbalisms that try to underplay the severity of drunkenness (e.g. referring to a drink with diminutives such as "a little drinky poo"), etc. etc. etc. It's very funny and ultimately (only if you watch these things in the context of the show) actually compellingly sad:

Another distinctive things about the show come out here. Lahey's relationship with Assistant Trailer Park Supervisor Randy BoBandy is never played for obvious "make fun of the gays" type laughs, something absolutely remarkable (as unheard of as chunking laugh track) for a TV comedy treating these themes at the turn of the millennium. 

Two other key personae are Corey and Trevor (the latter replaced by Jacob), who are dimwitted flunkies that worship Ricky and Julian. Here's one of many "best of" youtube reels:

There are five other important recurring characters in the show. Lucy (the mother of Ricky's daughter, Trinity) and Sarah, who his Lucy's best friend, and probably the least dysfunctional character in the show. They are not heavy handed about this, but Sarah is sometimes portrayed as actually successfully running the kinds of cons that Julian always ends up driving into the ground. Likewise J-Roc, a white rapper who doesn't really accept that he is white, and who also earns money through small time cons. The other two characters mostly round out Mr. Lahey early in the show's run, but come into their own as the seasons progress. These are Randy Bobandy, once a male prostitute but now Assistant Trailer Park Supervisor, and Barb, Lahey's ex-wife and owner of the park.

In addition to the way the show sends up Hegelianism (the RayAlexander's and I are seriously considering a monograph on this) I'm also fascinated about why the show continues to be compelling eleven seasons in. The two big challenges are, first, getting the viewer to care about such prima facie unpleasant characters, and, second, not becoming boring in the manner of other long running shows such as the American Office or Cheers. Interest in the first challenge should be heightened by the well known fact in the publishing world that MFA graduate written "campus novels" are usually so awful because the writers have no idea how uncompelling their characters are. This isn't just the tell-your-friends-your-dream-last-night thing of finding something interesting that objectively is not. Rather in unpublished academic novels the protagonists are often unpleasant in ways that are not clear to the writer, but serve to make it impossible for readers to become imaginatively complicit in the story. And, like all academic novels, Trailer Park Boys succeeds to the extent that it does by portraying a strange insular and disconnected community where (to paraphrase Henry Kissinger) the fights are so bitter because so little is at stake. It's very hard to write this kind of thing in a way where readers should care. The freak show aspect is not enough, you have to have characters that readers care about.

To make the show viewable Trailer Park Boys has to downplay the danger to children that environments so awash in illegality, booze, and drgus present to children in real life. Several key plot points involve kids and somehow in the fictional world you are reasonably sure they are going to be safe and loved. Likewise, the trauma of violence has to be reliably downplayed. There are several gunfights but no one is ever killed. Fights always involve a lot of shoving and comic falling over, never any eye gouging or broken skulls and backs. Even when people are shot or have trailer's fall on them they never evince real panic or agony. All of this only really works because the show is comedy and and because the fictional universe is so thickly realized that the viewer is never yanked back from her suspension of disbelief. Likewise, the sexual politics of the show are in the end unrealistic in a way that makes it more viewable. Real life Rickies direct their temper tantrums at their romantic partners. But Ricky is almost redeemed by his desire to "get his family back together" and the non-creepy approach to his relationship with Lucy. Note that many of these virtues were in danger of being lost in Season 10 with respect to Julian's story arc and the way rapper Snoop Dogg and his entourage played in the storyline, but the final episode pretty brilliantly regained the good will. In any case, I'd be really interested to reread academic novels with this new insight into what makes Trailer Park Boys watchable. Again, in both cases you have these ridiculous closed communities and in both cases the fact that much of the humor derives from the unpleasantness of the characters forces the writers to do more work to get the readers imaginatively complicit.

Another clear way that Trailer Park Boys succeeds where shows like the American Office don't is that the former never made one instance of romantic tension the major plot driver. In every case, resolving the tension (when the boy and girl finally get together) kills the show. Instead, the plot drivers are Julian's small time criminal schemes, each one of which typically develops over several episodes, Lahey's schemes to bring them down, and periodic external stimuli such as a Rush concert or one of their victims getting even. The main danger is the show getting repetitious. It hasn't happened yet, though I'm honestly unsure how they can compellingly follow up the end of Season 10. This feeling has happened before, and the ability of the writers to reset things is also pretty impressive. I wish I had better insight into why the resetting works.

In any case, if you haven't thusfar, Joe Bob says to check it out. It's not just worth thinking about, it's also very funny. On this, I'll close with one of the scenes where Ricky is leaving jail. Here the guards let Ricky out earlier because the guard team in the prisoner/guard hockey tournament will get stronger.