SCREENSHOTS

Crawford | Trailer Park | Film News, Buzz & Rumours

THE SALES PITCH would go a certain way: From the creator of Trailer Park Boys comes Crawford, a comedy about relocating raccoons, streaming now on CBC. And that’s true, TPB creator Mike Clattenburg, with collaborator and acclaimed Canadian musician Mike O’Neill (TUNS, Inbreds), have indeed created a comedy that involves a character with a perhaps spiritual relationship with these urban parasites.

“Trailer Park Boys was an extreme show,” says Clattenburg, who directed all 12 season one episodes of the new series. “Crawford is not extreme — it’s underplayed. We wanted to see what we could create with some of those limitations: trying not to hit jokes, trying to avoid tropes, trying to make something you hadn’t seen before.”

As the series opens, son Don (Kyle Mac) returns home, having toured the world with his semi-successful band; he’s frustrated by a lack of progress on a solo album. Home doesn’t lack for chaos, though; his father Owen (character actor John Carroll Lynch) is mute, and communicates via a text-to-voice app; his mother, Cynthia (Jill Hennessy) is facing pressure at her job as a high-level exec at a cereal company — not to mention, dad is an enthusiastic pot smoker and the parents are in a functional open marriage. Don’s brother Brian and sister Wendy (Daniel Davis Yang and Alice Moran) add complications to the dynamic.

“It’s a parody of dark drama,” is how O’Neill characterizes it. As Crawford unfolds, it follows Don’s success at ridding their home of a family of raccoons. “That seems to be his calling,” O’Neill offers. “It’s almost a larger case that we all experience — what’s something that I can do, that I’m interested in, but might not fit into the world.”

It remains to be seen how readily a CBC audience will embrace a patriarch who smokes THC-infused coconut oil with his son before they head off to the mall together, but writing is underway for a second season. All 12 Crawford episodes are currently streaming at cbc.ca; the show will air on celestial TV this summer.