If you haven’t heard yet, Canadian cult comedy television heros The Trailer Park Boys have returned… again. And this time it looks like they’re here to stay for a while.
That’s right, ten new episodes of Canada’s finest export (if you don’t count Molson’s Golden, Neil Young, Pamela Anderson, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Rush, Jessica Paré...). The Trailer Park Boys can now be seen in every territory within Netflix’s reach. Best of all, there’s a season beyond this one still to come in 2015. Supposedly their 2009 theatrical film Countdown to Liquor Day was meant to be their swan song, but John Paul Tremblay, Robb Wells and Mike Smith (Julian, Ricky and Bubbles) purchased the rights from the original producers. I hope they do this forever. It’s one of those things that could be sustained indefinitely.
If you haven’t heard of The Trailer Park Boys, in one sense, lucky you, because you now get to binge watch one of the greatest television comedies ever made, plus two standalone specials, two feature films and a live performance. They pump this stuff into your home like gas or electricity or… hash oil. What excuse do you have not to partake?
As I wrote on this blog last year:
One of my favorite things—literally one of my very, very favorite things in life—is the absolutely genius Canadian comedy series, The Trailer Park Boys.
It’s a masterpiece. By the time I discovered the show—obviously 99% of Canadian television never makes it south—it had already reached the end of its seven series run on the Showcase network in 2007. My wife and I “binge-watched” the entire thing in like two weeks, watching as many as five of them in a row some nights. It was comedy crack, we couldn’t get enough.
When we got to the last one, I told her that I felt like I wanted to weep. She admitted to feeling the same way. It was like we’d lost old friends. It massively sucked not to have any more episodes of The Trailer Park Boys.
Things spiraled out of control from there…
Seriously, though, a year later at about 6pm on a night that we were having a dinner party, a friend of mine wrote to ask if I’d heard about “Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys,” the Trailer Park Boys’ 2008 Christmas special. We couldn’t scoot our guests’ asses out the door fast enough!
When the new series opens, Ricky has “retired” with an enormous stash of weed hidden in the walls of his trailer and has stopped using money entirely, instead buying everything with pressed “hash coins” (which are accepted without comment by everyone). Julian has opened a strip club inside his trailer and Bubbles is about to launch his “Shed and Breakfast” business for people who are traveling with their cats (free pancakes!). White rapper J-Roc has his own brand of flavored vodka (which he describes as “the birth of Christ”). Barb, the owner of the Sunnyvale trailer park has caught her soon to be ex-husband Sam with a man and demands a divorce from this “bisexual caveman” who decides he’s going to screw her out of the Sunnyvale property which he plans to sell at a huge profit to real estate developers. The only thing standing in the way of his plan is Barb’s first bisexual ex-husband, the perpetually-soused retiring park supervisor Jim Lahey (played by the great John Dunsworth, easily THE BEST COMIC DRUNK OF ALL TIME) who owns the deciding 1% of the Sunnyvale stock.
Julian rallies Ricky and Bubbles to help raise enough money to save the park. Their plans involve hash oil, hookers and much more, but I won’t spoil it for you. We watched all of them in two sittings. My only complaint is that there weren’t more of them…
And speaking of the Trailer Park Boys, Swearnet: The Movie, the new theatrical release from John Paul Tremblay, Robb Wells and Mike Smith came out last weekend in select cities. The reviews were mostly terrible, but if you read between the lines, it seems like it would be a riot: