One show is exactly what was expected.
The other one is not what anyone would expect.
The two new series in question, respectively, are The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Funtime Hour -- which comes from the former Trailer Park Boys -- and Kenny Hotz's Triumph of the Will. Both shows debut with back-to-back episodes Friday, July 22 on the Shaw Media channel known as Action.
Do you get Action on your cable or satellite package? Who the heck knows? It isn't exactly a marquee destination. But that's where Shaw shoved these shows -- which were originally earmarked for Showcase -- after seeing the finished products.
Thinking back, we had a horrible feeling when The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Funtime Hour was green-lit a couple of years ago. Our first thought was, "Please let this project quietly die on the cutting-room floor."
The premise: Former Trailer Park Boys Mike Smith, Robb Wells and J.P. Tremblay are in the midst of shooting a TV sketch show in the fictional town of Port Cockerton. Things go nuts when an actor hired to play a German scientist (the late Maury Chaykin) adopts the personality of his character after synthesizing an addictive hallucinogen derived from local berries.
As the entire cast ingests the drugs, everyone believes they really are the characters they portray, from soldiers to mobsters to pirates to giant bugs.
Reuniting the cast of any well-known show -- especially one as beloved as Trailer Park Boys -- to play different characters on another show is never a good idea. And compounding the issue, Smith, Wells and Tremblay all play multiple characters.
This never really had a chance and somebody should have recognized it. But inadvertently, The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Funtime Hour may have perfected a form of reality TV.
To wit: It's a show about a show where people are affected by hallucinogens and don't know they're in a show; yet the real-life show seems as if it were made by people on hallucinogens, too.
And speaking of hallucinogens, maybe we were on them when we first watched an episode of Kenny Hotz's Triumph of the Will. How else to explain it? Did Hotz, formerly of the juvenile-targeted Kenny vs. Spenny, actually show his ... good lord, we can't believe we're typing this ... sweet side?
Each episode of Triumph of the Will finds Kenny taking on seemingly impossible missions, like determining if the American dream still is alive, or investigating whether pigs are too smart to be eaten, or trying to find love for his widowed mother.
It was the widowed-mom episode that we saw first, although it isn't airing till next week. While the other episodes have more of a "standard Kenny" feel to them, if that's a thing, the mom episode truly was touching in places, even sad.
Kenny clearly loves his mom dearly, and vice versa. Their relationship reminded me of David Letterman's relationship with his mother: You know, the looking-for-a-laugh son always trying to get a comedic rise out of Mom, and the more outrageous the son gets, the mom just sighs and smiles politely and endures. It's a window into how and why the sons turned out the way they did.
One of the ironies here is that Triumph of the Will is airing on Action, which supposedly is geared toward young males. The pacing of the show is not at all frantic. And 15-year-olds tuning in next week to watch the czar of toilet humour throwing feces will be dumbfounded by the bittersweet emotions of the mom episode, for sure.
No matter what you're expecting or what your tastes are, we can say this with confidence:
If you watch a full two-hour block of The Drunk and On Drugs Happy Funtime Hour and Kenny Hotz's Triumph of the Will in one sitting, you may be left thinking you're actually in Port Cockerton, and you're the mayor.
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