Trailer Park Boys: Vulgar, Raunchy, and Canadian
Vulgar, Raunchy, and Canadian The Showcase Television Network series, Trailer Park Boys, is a Canadian mockumentary created and directed by Mike Clattenburg. The show covers the shenanigans and crimes of the fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park residents. Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles, the three protagonists, are constantly on the hunt for ways to make money, find liquor, and stay out of jail. All the while, their sworn enemies - the drunken trailer park supervisor Jim Lahey, and the perpetually shirtless Randy Bobandy - are coming up with schemes to catch the boys doing something illegal and send them back to the prison. Like other mockumentary shows, such as The Office and Modern Family, a portion of the show is dedicated to confessionals between the residents and the camera crew that not-so-subtly follows them around. Unlike other mockumentary shows, Trailer Park Boys prides itself on being vulgar and obscene. Throughout the series seven year run, the word “fuck” was said 1,284 times and the word “shit” was said 967 times. Despite being very successful in Canada, Australia, Spain, and Denmark, the show has never found success in the United States where it aired on BBC America (obviously it was censored heavily). The show’s success has led to two feature-length films that, despite positive critical reception, never reached the same success as the show from which they derived. The documentary style filmmaking that the show uses provides story telling elements that a standard television show lacks. The one-on-one interviews with the camera that take about roughly a tenth of the airtime both allow the audience to understand the character’s thoughts without confusing internal diegetic inserts and understand the context of the story without monotonous and unrealistic dialogue. Throughout the series the film crew is frequently acknowledged as being present; this usually occurs when a character is upset with the crew for getting in the way. In the 7th season episode, “We