A good fan guide should do two things: give devotees of a TV series a chance to revisit great characters and moments from favourite episodes, and provide background information about the show. The Complete Trailer Park Boys does plenty of the first and none of the second.

Trailer Park Boys is, of course, the highly successful mockumentary comedy series about three petty criminals – Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles (played by Rob Wells, John Paul Tremblay, and Mike Smith, respectively) – living in a trailer park in Nova Scotia. Created by Mike Clattenburg in 2001, the show has aired for six TV seasons on the Showcase network, spawned a 2006 feature film, and become a pop-culture phenomenon.

Sibiga and Wininger’s book consists of a 58-page survey of the show’s 11 major characters, a 104-page episode guide covering seasons one through six, and a 20-page collection of humorous miscellany, called “Other Shit.” For the most part, the authors are on target here, sampling widely from the show’s lovable characters and their ludicrous exploits, spotlighting everything from Ricky’s dilapidated 1975 Chrysler New Yorker (the “Shitmobile”) to Julian’s seemingly bottomless glass of rum and Coke to Bubbles’ pot-eating pet cougar named Steve French.

Disappointingly, however, the authors also give far too much space to filler jokes that have little to do with the show itself, all space that would have been far better used for cast and crew bios and information about the group’s working methods.

The book’s appearance is also troubling. While the Trailer Park Boys aesthetic is certainly low-budget, this book looks as if it were designed using a decade-old desktop publishing program. Most of the hundreds of photos are screen captures. Where are the behind-the-scenes shots?

One clever design touch is the “Bad Boys Scale,” a system that rates each episode according to its racier content, using icons for booze, pot plants, and bullets. For the trailer park boys, of course, the more of those things the better.