Feuds, failures and furry friends
Creators of Trailer Park Boys launch new ensemble comedy on CBC
What do a mute ex-cop, a highpowered cereal company executive and a raccoon corraller have in common?
On the new CBC comedy Crawford, they’re all just part of one big happily dysfunctional family.
The new 12-episode series starring John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Zodiac) and Jill Hennessy (Law & Order, Crossing Jordan) is the latest project from the Halifax team of Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg and writing partner Mike O’neill. Shot in Etobicoke and other Toronto neighbourhoods, Crawford began streaming on Friday on the CBCTV app and at cbc.ca/watch, with a network air date planned for this summer.
It’s a shaggy dog tale of feuds, failed business ventures and the furry friends who formed the germ of an idea for the show in the first place.
“For every project I’ve worked on with Mike, he starts off with a pretty compelling concept,” says O’neill, who also composes the show’s upbeat score. “I remember him saying, ‘I wanna do a show, and it’s about a guy who relocates raccoons.’ That’s not enough to build a show on, but it’s a good start.
“Even now, with all the other characters added and all the new story details, if someone asks me what the show is about, I return to Mike’s original line about a guy who relocates raccoons, and it just makes them laugh right off the bat.”
Searching for a series idea after working on two seasons of Black Jesus for Adult Swim in Los Angeles, Clattenburg recalled working with raccoons on the set of Trailer Park Boys, when a family of them set their sights on Ricky’s car.
“We were shooting the scene, and I wandered over to this cage full of raccoon kits, and one of the little guys grabbed my finger. It was so cute, with his little hand, and I kind of became enchanted with them,” says the writer/director, who started brainstorming with O’neill about expanding the raccoon relocater’s world even further.
On Crawford, raccoon whisperer Don (Kyle Mac from Netflix’s Between) is a failed rock star whose dad Owen (Lynch) was rendered mute in the line of duty by a bullet in the head, while mom Cynthia (Hennessy) is a cereal company executive trying to revolutionize the world of breakfast foods.
As the series unspools, the world expands, and we learn more about Don’s unconventional siblings Wendy ( Alice Moran) and Brian (Daniel Davis Yang), meet Cynthia’s competitive co-workers, and see familiar faces like Halifax-born Anthony Sherwood (Street Legal) and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson.
“I love an ensemble cast,” says Clattenburg. “We had a huge cast on Trailer Park Boys, a huge cast on Black Jesus, and a huge cast on Crawford. It’s nice to see them work together as one entity.
“We don’t always focus on one character; it’s not about one hero that we follow. We focus on the family and their group of friends.”
While most of the regular cast consists of rising stars on the Toronto comedy and theatre scene, Clattenburg and O’neill made sure their lead characters would be as interesting as possible to attract name actors like Lynch and Hennessy to Crawford.
For example, Lynch’s Owen only speaks through his smartphone’s text-to-voice app, requiring him to use facial expressions and body language.
“John likes to work on unusual projects and he was the big fish we were after, so he bit and he liked the challenge of acting without speaking,” says Clattenburg. “There’s a neat effect where you start to hear his persona through his phone.
“He’s so expressive and interesting that you can still hear him.
“I think it’s the same thing with Jill. She liked this character who’s a bit of a rock star in the cereal world, who enjoys an open marriage and is about to launch the first mega-cereal ever made. And she’s putting toys back in cereal boxes. She thought she could really sink her teeth into that, and we’re very lucky that our characters could attract some great actors, which helped the rest of the cast come together very quickly.”
The writing team for Crawford is already working on story ideas for a second season, should it be greenlit, extending the strange twists and turns of its first 12 episodes.
While the show definitely has its own unique flavour, avoiding the pitfalls of sitcom cliches, it also fits in comfortably with CBC’S lineup of character-driven comedies like Mr. D and Schitt’s Creek.
“It’s distinctly not mean and it’s not the kind of show where you get laughs at other people’s expense,” says O’neill.