Over the past six weeks, I've watched five seasons of 'Trailer Park Boys'. It is a bit weird, and it wasn't til the 3rd episode that I was hooked on the series.
Basic premise? Well....it's set in Nova Scotia, Canada....in a cheapo trailer park. The three chief characters are Julian, Ricky and 'Bubbles'. Their basic reason to exist in life? Booze, marijuana, and scheming to get ahead through illegal means.
Beneath the three characters....there are around fifteen sub-characters. There's the drunken trailer-park supervisor, his gay associate, the owner of the park, a 1-star white rapster, Ricky's love interest, two half-wits who serve Ricky and Julian, etc.
At some point in the last week, it suddenly hit me that this is mostly all the landscape and character types of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat novel (involving Danny, Pilon, Pablo, and Jesus).
In the Steinbeck novel, Danny's 'gang' is forever trying to get ahead, but miserably failing. Alcohol is part of the background and you generally felt sorry for the boys. You see the same problem for Julian and Ricky's crew.
Dogs are a big deal in Steinbeck's novel.....while cats are the big deal for Trailer Park Boys.
It's just an odd thing to compare these and they seem marginally similar, although one is set in the 1920s.....the other in the past decade.
As for recommending Trailer Park Boys? I suspect that 80-percent of people will find it lacking or too-crazy. But if you were just looking for something 'different'....this probably meets that requirement.
We are part-way through SHAMELESS and BOSCH.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the recommendations!
Was just googling to see if anyone else had made this connection. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteSame here haha. It's a fun realization. I had watched this show several times in the past but just read Tortilla Flats a few months ago.
DeleteNow, if you asked how many people have ever read Tortilla Flat, or watched the 1942 movie...it's probably fewer than a quarter of 1-percent of the nation. And I doubt that the Trailer Park Boys ever read the novel.
ReplyDeleteHe's one of the most famous authors in the world. I'd say the chance that a modern writer has read everything by Steinbeck is pretty good.
DeleteI caught onto Steinbeck at age 15. By the end of high school, I had read 95-percent of his books (the county library simply didn't have all of them).
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in the 80s, I found the remaining ones at some massive library sale in Louisiana, and finished them.
I like the style, and slant of the stories. Regular people...put into odd situations...consequences have to occur that aren't really good or bad.
If you ask most college graduates from the past 20 years...I doubt if you find more than a quarter of 1-percent who've read one single novel from Steinbeck.
Trailer Park Boys (humble feeling) peaked between season 4 and 7. I doubt if the writing team or the crew really could grasp where the characters were going, and were just 'winging' it half the time. It helped to binge-watch it. I felt the same about BB (Breaking Bad) and Saul. Back in early 2021, I finally caught Game of Thrones (being overseas most of my life....I never saw it). Binge-watching helped to appreciate the writing and clear text.