It takes most of a long weekend to watch the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys from Alliance Atlantis (on DVD), and there may be few better ways to squander one’s evenings. I have not yet lived in a trailer park, gone to jail, robbed a convenience store, run a grow-op in an Airstream trailer, collected ladybugs to protect my marijuana plants or lost a marijuana plant to squirrel piss. I have never fired a handgun or been shot in the ass, nor have I had a veterinarian for an enemy. And although I have tried, I have never learned to keep a highball in hand night and day after day, wherever I am, and never spill a drop.

Nevertheless I have never been so well understood as I am by these stories of trailer park boys: never has my life as a middle-class boy and man been so exposed to view as it is by the antics of these archetypal male figures, all of whom appear to be high-school dropouts (something I wanted to try but never did): sentimental dope grower, sentimental mastermind of crime, trailer-park supervisor, trailer-park assistant supervisor, faux rapper, hapless hip-hopper. These trailer park boys are all the boys I have known: they are us.

The stories are classic slapstick, the accents are classic Nova Scotia, the camera work, the direction and the acting (acting seems hardly the right word: being might be more appropriate for these performances) are unsurpassed in the history of video drama.