My list of comfort shows goes as follows, with none in particular more favorite than the next- “Comfort Tier” I’ll name them: The Office, Frasier, The Wonder Years, and Trailer Park Boys. This is the “Any Episode, Any Time, Any AMOUNT Of Times” club. I could go on at length about each on this list, but tonight I watched some random Season 2 episode of TPB from the bath tub and I remembered the magic that the original Showcase seasons captured that the later Netflix seasons would incline me to lose interest and forget.
I found the show when I was living in North Carolina, working nights in a strange city- a dark and fraught time in my life- and I latched onto it. There was a heart to the show that reminded me of home in a way the city I lived in never did.
Somehow the show manages to depict reality in one of the most gritty ways I’ve ever seen, on par with shock arthouse films like “Gummo,” but simultaneously manages it with a miraculously upbeat tone and deadpan humor. The upbeat tone mostly comes from a recurring plot structure, in which protagonists and antagonists frequently compromise, exchange favors, and come together to address meta-threats. It has this effect of lowering the already ridiculously low stakes, so that this overarching feeling of Safety and dare I say “coziness” permeates throughout the show, even if what is happening is wildly out of pocket (like stealing gas from parked cars and opening an illegal bootleg gas station laundering money through the lady’s hair salon with coupons).
The other thing the show does really well, I think, is depict a particular side of poverty. Not the ugly side of it, but really the most noble and loving and neighborly side of it. It’s a community that knows and cares about each other, even while reviling them. There’s a nobility to the characters. An integrity. The female characters maintain their dignity and femininity, without devolving into easy stereotypical jabs at “trailer trash.” The dark side is there- people living in cars, eating food off the ground, rampant pervasive alcoholism, cigarette/weed addiction, prostitution- but somehow the characters hold this dark world together through friendship and a kind of ‘civic duty’ to their Home, the Trailer Park.
My favorite characters were always Jim Layhey, Ray, and Ricky. Bubbles kind of rubbed me the wrong way initially, and then severely in the much later seasons. Something not right with that actor. But everything Ray says makes me laugh, for some reason.
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