From Trailer Trash to Trailer Park Boys (Critical Essay‪)‬

Though little-known in the United States, Trailer Park Boys is one of the most popular programs in the history of Canadian television. Over seven seasons and two feature films, (1) the show has offered a mockumentary window into the lives of a group of petty criminals in a Nova Scotia trailer park. As one series character explains, the program is "kinda like COPS, but from a criminal's point of view" ("Fuck Community College, Let's Get Drunk and Eat Chicken Fingers," Season 1: Episode 2). But where COPS and similar reality shows hide their schadenfreude ethos behind a pose of verite objectivity, Trailer Park Boys clearly plays the absurd criminal schemes and quotidian adventures of Sunnyvale Trailer Park's loser heroes--Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles--for laughs. They subsist on a diet of cheap booze, pepperoni and chicken fingers and speak in a vernacular that is equal parts malapropism ("cubic zarcarbian," "supply and command," "get two birds stoned at once") and obscenity (in one episode, the word "fuck" is spoken 91 times), but while some critics of Trailer Park Boys deride the show for "laughing at the poor," its out-sized characters are drawn with remarkable affection. "The idea isn't to make trailer parks look bad or have fun at their expense," series creator and director, Mike Clattenberg claims. "It's about the people on the show playing the cards they're dealt." (2) While Trailer Park Boys draws easy comparisons to other situation comedies having to do with socio-economic class, from The Honeymooners, to The Jeffersons, to My Name is Earl, it differs from them in two significant ways. The first is its mockumentary realism. Where the typical sitcom plays its thin plots and relentless gags on a state-of-the-art studio soundstage before a live audience, Trailer Park Boys was, until Season Six, shot entirely on location at three different Nova Scotia trailer parks, in a coarse documentary style that is partly a matter of budget, and partly a matter of design. The show looks and feels remarkably like what it is supposed to be: a cheap documentary of trailer park life compiled by amateur filmmakers, for reasons that are never made clear. The second difference between Trailer Park Boys and these other programs is the characters' tightly-circumscribed worldview. Where Ralph Cramden indulges fantasies of an upper-class existence funded by prize money from The $64,000 Question, and George Jefferson dreams of "moving on up" to the East Side, and Earl Hickey hopes to balance his cosmic books by righting all of the wrongs he has done, the boys of Sunnyvale want nothing more than to stay precisely where they are, and to have just enough money to "hang out and get drunk with friends."