You may recall that I have only been recently introduced to the Trailer Park Boys, and I have spent the ensuing days in something of a daze, slowly turning over each episode in my mind like a jewel.

Nicole says many wise things; it was in Nicole’s kitchen today that she said perhaps the wisest thing she has ever said to me.

“Who is your favorite Trailer Park Boy?”

I needed no deliberation. “Ricky. I love Bubbles, obviously, but…Ricky.”

(It should go without saying that Julian, while better than 99% of any characters ever created on television, was not a contender. Every character on this show is a flawlessly rendered work of art, but one can only have one favorite.)

“Ricky,” Nicole said, “is a modern Falstaff.”

HAS ANYONE EVER BEEN MORE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING? “A knave without malice, a liar without deceit, and a knight, a gentleman, and a soldier without either dignity, decency, or honour. This is a character which, though it may be decompounded, could not, I believe, have been formed, nor the ingredients of it duly mingled, upon any receipt whatever. It required the hand of Shakespeare himself to give to every particular part a relish of the whole, and of the whole to every particular part…” could those words have been written about anyone but Ricky?

Give Ricky these four-and-a-half minutes. Watch him grow in strength and conviction as he realizes the system is no match for him. Watch him leap from triumph to triumph. Ricky is irrepressible, a male Molly Brown.

It would be a mistake of the first order to confuse the Trailer Park Boys with something goofy and inoffensively stupid like Super Troopers. The Trailer Park Boys are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They are eternal, they are comic in the Grecian sense of the word, they are Bacchian, they are satyrs, they are night revelers, they are the Lords of Misrule. Ricky is half Loki and half Orson Welles, eternally dreaming, eternally unruly, a pompadoured Bacchus. Ricky is the single greatest comedic character of the twenty-first century, and actors will be studying his arc for years to come.

N.B. I have never hated anyone, fictional or otherwise, as much as I hate Jim Lahey. Fuck Lahey.