The fictional trailer park of Sunnyvale (located in Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia) is the partial-home to Julian, Ricky and Bubbles (John Paul Tremblay, Robb Wells and Mike Smith respectively) who the other half of the time just call their home ‘prison’.
As the smart and respectable Julian and the not-so-smart and not-so-respectable Ricky try to plot their way through criminal life, they are assisted by their somewhat conscientious and thickly bespectacled best-friend Bubbles.
Always on their tails, however, is the trailerpark Supervisor, ex-cop and profound alcoholic Jim Lahey (John Dunsworth), accompanied by Randy (Patrick Roach), a cheese-burger-loving side-kick and ex-male prostitute who refuses to ever wear a shirt.
Trailer Park Boys Cast
There is a strong supporting cast of characters besides Lahey and Randy, including Ricky’s long-time girlfriend Sarah (Sarah Dunsworth), her trailer-mate Lucy (Lucy Decoutere), Ricky’s father Ray (Barrie Dunn), local wanna-be rapper J’Roc (Jonathan Torrens), and fall-guy minions Cory and Trevor (Cory Bowles and Michael Jackson respectively).
Every character has their place in the fish-bowl of Sunnyvale, while frequent visitors come in all shapes and sizes – even including a drug-addicted cougar and a psychopathic puppet.
John Paul Tremblay’s Julian is very much the straight-man of the show, and needs to be, while Rob Wells and John Dunsworth are both outstanding in the brilliant roles of mortal enemies Ricky and Lahey. Mike Smith as the lovable Bubbles will never utter a funnier line than, “There’s a note pinned to the tree! Diddily-dee!”, and Patrick Roach as Randy more than rounds off the cast (pun very much intended.)
Ellen Page even makes several brief appearances in 2001-2 as Jim Lahey’s daughter, and you can be sure that her time on a show as grounded as TPB will have been a positive factor in her early development.
Trailer Park Boys Seasons 1-7
From the first season to the seventh (comprising of over 50 episodes, a christmas one-hour special feature and the movie Big Dirty) TPB is one of the funniest shows you will ever see (along with Spaced and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace). There’s a gold mine of laughs as the characters fumble their way through the half-scripted, half-improvised scenes.
As the show progressed from it’s first season into the second, it was clear that the cast were not only adept and comfortable with their characters, but were now perfecting and expanding them to new heights of debauchery, cunning and downright madness. Four more seasons later and TPB was still going strong, still so funny that you wish it could go on forever.
Then the seventh season saw a shift in the creative approach, using HD quality filming instead of the previous six seasons’ very rough cuts. Some fans did not prefer this arrangement, citing the show’s original rawness as one of it’s appeals – and they make a fair point. Nevertheless, any show that boasts “the personal train of Patrick Swayze!” as well as cameos by Sebastian Bach and the return of a certain hand puppet can’t be all bad now can it?
Trailer Park Boys Season 8 and Future Spin-Off
The production of another one-hour special episode is scheduled to be released and while some doubt persists about there being an eighth and probably final season, Showcase has indicated that filming will commence for a 2009 release.
There is also the rumour of a future spin-off being developed, although nothing is known about that yet.
And Finally: Ricky-isms
One of the show’s many particular features, besides Lahey’s faeces-related analogies and Ricky’s knock, knock jokes, is what’s called a Ricky-ism. This usually involves mispronounciations on Ricky’s part coupled with his extremely limited ability to perceive the world around him.
As a result, Ricky seems to believe that there are “tropical earthquakes” and that something can’t be as difficult as “rocket appliances”; that you can “get two birds stoned at once” and that someone can look like “Indianapolis Jones”; that a woman’s maiden name is her “mating name” and that he himself must be “fire retarded”; that people can pass tests with “flying carpets” and that some things require the process of “denial and error”. And when he’s not considering the “worst case Ontario”, Ricky is lecturing someone on whether they own space – astutely pointing out that they don’t, because NASA does (which he calls NAY-SA).
Priceless.
