I’ve been listening to the Trailer Park Boys Podcast pretty obsessively over the last couple weeks. Burning through the backlog, in fact, listening to as many as three a day. There are only 20 episodes so far, so I’ll probably be caught up by Xmas.
The podcast is usually just the boys sitting around a table, bickering and ripping on each other, occasionally talking about various headlines or random fun facts. A few episodes feature special guests, including but not limited to: Snoop Dogg, Jay Baruchel, and Esa Tikkanen. Also, Randy shows up every once in a while. So far, it’s been pretty darn hilarious.
The first two episodes are a bit slow, both of them leaning heavily on Ricky’s inability to grasp what a podcast is. The joke wears itself out quickly, but things get considerably better by the third episode. By the time they’re doing episodes while on tour in Europe, it goes from ‘great’ to ‘amazing’ and there’s really no longer any competition for the top spot on my Favourite Podcasts list.
One thing that I realized while listening to these, is that the show is at its very best when it’s just Ricky and Bubbles. Julian is a crucial character to the show, and there’s plenty to like about him there, but on the podcast he mostly just complains about how the other two aren’t doing a good enough job. When Ricky and Bubbles are let loose to basically just talk and joke with each other, it’s simply magic. Wonderful listening. I’m not saying that cutting Julian from the show entirely would make it better, but it’s nice to just let the other two go unfiltered once in a while.
I would be remiss to omit that iTunes has ranked the TPB Podcast as one of the best of 2015, so you know that it’s not just me singing its praises. I whole-heartedly recommend checking this one out. You can listen to it on iTunes or Libsyn, and they even film each episode so that you can watch the madness unfold on Swearnet. You’ve gotta be a subscriber to watch it, but hey, you should probably subscribe to Swearnet anyway.