Either can Trailer Park Boys, or Let Mike Clattenburg cook
However the fuck you wanna describe ‘Trailer Park Boys’, the first word out of your mouth should be ‘authentic’. The second could be any of a variety of words and terms: raw, hilarious, self-aware, self-deprecating, original, charming, gaggy, progressive– the list goes on.
Scratch that, actually.
The first word should be ‘fuckin’’ with a certain Maritime twang, and authentic should follow immediately after.
Fuckin’ authentic, that’s what Trailer Park Boys is.
After developing Trailer Park Boys out of a series of short films alongside stars Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay and actor-producer Barrie Dunn, Mike Clattenburg created ‘Black Jesus’ which lasted three seasons from 2014 to 2019, and depicts Jesus Christ living in modern-day Compton and had pastors calling for its removal from television.
Needless to say, Mike Clattenburg knows how to make a project unique, even today at a time where it feels like everything has already been made. And while you’d be right to argue unique doesn’t necessarily equal better, it certainly makes a show more intriguing, and helps it stand out among the sea of copycats and formulaic bullshit that big studios continuously pump out.
Enter: the authenticity of Trailer Park Boys.
The lore begins in 1995 with Clattenburg’s 10-minute short film, ‘The Cart Boy’, which stars the three main Trailer Park Boys’ actors (Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith) and serves as the inspiration for Smith’s character, Bubbles.
‘Darren’, as he’s called in the film, is eerily similar to Bubbles in the show’s early seasons– right down to his pseudo-philosophical one-lines, love for kitties, and deadpan, curse-infused comebacks. Ricky and Julian (called Jason in ‘The Cart Boy’) as well, though not being ‘self-employed’ in ‘The Cart Boy’, are much closer to their actual characters than in the 1999 short film that followed, ‘One Last Shot’. This quote from Ricky is a prime example: “I mean here the guy is trying to save up money to buy a prosthetic limb for his cat, and I’m sitting in his living room fuckin’ drunk. Fuck I was a dick back then.”
Beyond that, it ends with a comically wholesome moment that you could convince me was out of a Trailer Park Boys season finale had I not seen the show more times than I can count. All those adjectives I used in my opening paragraph– they apply just as well to The Cart Boy. I won’t spoil it for you, but know that it exists on YouTube if you’re curious.
On the other hand, ‘One Last Shot’, the 1998 short film shot entirely in black-and-white starring Wells and Tremblay– despite being often cited as the beginning of a good thing, and its widespread availability via Netflix– is fucking weird.
That’s not to say it doesn’t make its mark on the final product. It adds the drugs and the drug-related crime, various plot devices, the infamous New Yorker, and of course, Mr. Lahey– err, Mr. Layhie– as the insane, drunken antagonist.
Though One Last Shot’s ‘Mr. Layhie’ is no Mr. Lahey. While both a drunk and a bastard– Lahey’s two most prominent personality traits– Layhie hacks Lahey’s motive. In Trailer Park Boys, Lahey is consistently driven drunk and mad in his attempts to protect the park from the antics of Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles (who will hereby be referred to as ‘the boys’). Layhie, meanwhile, is drunk and miserable entirely of his own doing and lacks the redeemable qualities that make his alter-ego such an empathetic character in Trailer Park Boys.
The final instalment of the pre-television era is the 1999 short film, also shot in black-and-white, which shares the franchise’s namesake. The film plays much like an episode of Trailer Park Boys, and after seeing it at the Atlantic Film Festival that same year, producer Barrie Dunn thought, ‘huh– this could make for a pretty damn good TV show.’
Needless to say, he was right.
The show was workshopped by Dunn, Clattenburg, Wells and Tremblay before they ventured off to Toronto to pitch to The Comedy Network.
The Comedy Network told them to make like a tree and fuck off.
‘Way of the road,’ said the group, before taking their project to the then-four-year-old network Showcase as a last ditch effort.
Showcase said, ‘Does the bear shit on the pope?’ Of course we want you.
Sometimes she goes, sometimes she doesn’t go. This time, she fuckin’ went all the way to the moon– or atleast, as high as you can get out of a Nova Scotia trailer park, which as the boys proved, is pretty fuckin’ high. And they did so in a fascinating manner.
The truth is, Trailer Park Boys’ popularity was a slow burn. Showcase simply had nothing else worthwhile to put on primetime television thanks to CRTC regulations, and over time the show developed a loyal cult following that grew exponentially, into the rest of the country and eventually around the world courtesy of Netflix.
Netflix– it’s often said that Netflix ruined the show, but could any studio have replicated Mike Clattenburg’s work through seasons one-to-seven?
The writing declined. Trailer Park Boys went from a show which championed one of the strongest gay relationships on television, Lahey and Randy, to one that makes entire characters based upon their disposition for sexual abuse (real ones know that season one Candy is way better than season ten Candy).
The show’s unscripted nature and vague, recurring jokes made for a unique watching experience that felt to a Frederictonian like it represented his niche corner of the globe exceptionally well. The Maritimes are Canadian, and Canadians are nice, yadi-yada– but Maritimers are fucking weird too, and the show and its humour capture that Maritime weirdness well.
Those early seasons– the Clattenburg era, if you will– are as though they’re specifically designed with not just humour in mind, but that special Maritime humour in mind. The accents, while exaggerated (Bubbles’ accent in particular) are distinctly Maritime Canadian. The brand names, locations, shopping outlets, and food items are the same: the LC, Alexander Keith’s, King of Donair, and of course, Ricky’s infamous pepperoni cocks.
But what those early seasons capture so well goes so far beyond material things. It’s the outlook and attitude that Maritimers have that makes them so weird. The rampant vulgarity alongside the show’s progressive political leanings feels like mashing a square peg into a round hole, yet it works. And it works because it’s fucking Nova Scotia, and that’s just how shit is around these parts.
At the end of season seven, Julian is in possession of the $480 thousand from the boys’ drug deal, and is waiting on Ricky, who has just graduated grade 11 in American prison and is cellmates with his father, both soon-to-be-released to share the wealth around. Lahey resigned from the police force and is content with his life as a drunken trailer park supervisor with Randy by his side, who is content in his new stoner lifestyle and is a new parent with Lucy. All the characters that make up the community– a central theme to the show– are happy coexisting together. In the final shot, all these former foes are mingling amongst each other as happy instrumental fades out with the shot: Ray and Lahey, Ricky and Randy, and for whatever reason, Thomas Collins and Shitty Bill are off in a corner chatting each other up about… well who really knows?
The show should have ended there. The show deserved to end there– but sometimes, as the show has taught us on-screen, it can be worthwhile to sell out for a bag of cash– and Netflix offered just that.
In 2016, a CBC article was published with the headline, ‘Trailer Park Boys new success comes from being less Canadian, says expert’.
The show’s initial run had lasted until 2008, and it wasn’t until 2014 when the show was picked back up by the streaming giant, whose style goes together with that of Trailer Park Boys like shit and strawberry shortcake.
Clattenburg was gone– it had been his intention for the show to end when it ended, and he was off to bigger and better things. Instead, it was the boys– Robb Wells, Mike Smith, John Paul Tremblay, and of course producer-actor Barrie Dunn left to recapture their old glory with the help of Netflix executives who likely did more harm than good. I say that, not because executives can’t create good things, but because Trailer Park Boys was not meant to be produced by a team of executives.
It was meant to be produced by Mike Clattenburg, and without him, the show devolved.
What was incredibly clever and vulgar humour transformed into straight up vulgarity, which reached a pinnacle when ‘SwearNet: The Movie’ won a Guinness world record for most curse words in a movie with 868.
The characters changed, but not intentionally, and not in a good way. Bubbles went from quoting Plato to coax Ricky into marriage to sulking for an entire episode because he got called a ‘nerd’. Ricky can hardly comprehend his own thoughts– it’s not that he was intelligent before, but he did have personality traits beyond his stupidity. Post-season seven, Ricky’s typical response to new information is to become so incredibly frustrated with his own (lack of a) thought process that he lashes out in anger.
One bright spot was J-Roc. With side characters receiving more say over their lines, Jonathan Torrens’ comedic prowess was allowed to flourish. Unfortunately it wasn’t for long, as he decided to move on after season ten.
As is common in television, new characters added to the show didn’t bring the same appeal that earlier ones did. It may have been nostalgia, but I would argue that nostalgia is right, in this case. The newer characters suffered the same downfalls as the ones who had been mainstays since season one– they were written lazily and were often made out to be gags in and of themselves, whereas in the early seasons, the characters were gags, but with their own complex relationships and problems that were treated seriously.
Fast-forward into the modern era, and the boys have taken matters into their own hands. Now divorced from Netflix, the gang continues to produce content via their own streaming network, ‘SweaNnet’.
You’d think them being in charge of their own show would be a good thing, but no– they’ve gone from trying to scam dummies for change on-screen, to scamming us, the viewer. Swearnet pumps out massive amounts of products and forms of entertainment: beer, podcasts, episodes set in prison, merchandise, etc. – and very, very little of it is quality.
And I don’t mean it isn’t quality in the way that Trailer Park Boys was ‘low-quality’ in its beginning. SwearNet has the budget, and it shows. They’ve shifted from a focus on the quality of the humour and product to a focus on the brand’s reach.
SwearNet at this point, is a trio of fallen-off seniors trying to milk every last penny they can get out of their fifteen minutes of fame. It’s tough to fault them for it– they’ve poured their hearts and souls into their work, embodying their characters as secondary personalities and masquerading as them in public periodically for decades.
However, the show’s charm has not survived into adolescence as well as the actors have into antiquity. For as much soul as they poured into their product over the years, it doesn’t have much left in it. There are only so many ways in which you can take a show premised upon petty crime and drug deals out of a Nova Scotia trailer park before it becomes stale– and at this point, I’m convinced the only one who could find a way to untangle that mess is Mike Clattenburg himself.