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Canwest News Service
Ten years of starring in Trailer Park Boys projects – and even doing their interviews in character – has made actors Robb Wells, Jean Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith virtually indistinguishable from Ricky, Julian and Bubbles, the hard-luck bad boys of Sunnyvale Trailer Park.
Their next show, The Drunk and on Drugs Happy Funtime Hour, sounds like a nightmare fit for any member of that trio: It depicts the cast of a TV show one day waking up convinced they're the zany characters they have played in front of the cameras.
The long-rumoured six-episode series from the core Trailer Park trio will air on Showcase sometime next year – probably the fall.
According to Smith, known to TPB fans as Bubbles, the show began with the question: "What if we did a kids' show and everybody on the kids' show did hallucinogenic drugs?"
The new comedy will follow the travails of the cast of a recently wrapped up children's television show called The Happy Funtime Hour, which was shot in the fictional East Coast town of Port Cockerton. One of the actors, who portrays a crazed scientist who teaches tube-watching tykes about nutrition (the actor will in turn be played by Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson) concocts a batch of homebrewed hallucinogenic berries. These convince the cast that they are in fact the superheroes, pirates and playboys of the TV show.
In a bid to smash any typecasting of Smith, Tremblay and Wells, The Drunk and on Drugs Happy Funtime Hour (the title is still tentative) will see each of them play so many characters, hidden by so much makeup and prosthetics, that it will be hard for viewers to keep track of who's who. Each will play between six and 10 roles, populating Port Cockerton with personalities the actor-writers came up with to crack each other up.
On a phone call from Halifax yesterday, Wells, who played Trailer Park Boy Ricky, said, "I think we loved playing those characters, but it's very exciting to move on and do other characters."
"We knew that when we did a show after The Trailer Park Boys, we were going to have multiple characters with heavy prosthetics. If we're going to break the mould of these [Trailer Park Boys] characters, we'll show people numerous versions of ourselves," said Smith.
Wells said Lifeson, for his part, is "a great character actor when he gets his little teeth and his professor's coat on."
The Trailer Park Boys franchise, now apparently wrapped up for good, ran for seven seasons and was spun off into multiple specials and two feature films, including Countdown to Liquor Day, which was released in September to generally weak reviews.
Tremblay (Julian of the Boys) said the new project will differ in "pretty much every way." The feel and the style of humour will change depending on which set of characters the action is following. While divided into vignettes, the six episodes will together follow a narrative arc.
As with Trailer Park Boys, the hope is to stay drunk and on drugs together for years to come. "We've spent a lot of time which each other and we all share the same sense of humour. We're happy to be working with each other," Tremblay said. "We're hoping it can live well beyond six episodes."
