Hardy Bucks

Plot

The webisodes (2008–2009)

The story starts in Castletown, a town so small that everyone in it knows everyone else's business and nobody in it has anywhere to go. Eddie Durkan (Martin Maloney) is the ringleader: loud, confident, permanently skint, and always halfway into a scheme that will supposedly fix everything. Around him orbit his long-suffering mates. Buzz McDonald (Owen Colgan) is the deadpan one, a man of few words and fewer ambitions. French Toast O'Toole (Peter Cassidy) is the dim, cheerful follower who will agree to anything. Boo (Tom Kilgalon) drifts at the edge of the group. And looming over them all is The Viper (Chris Tordoff), the town's self-styled gangster, a drug dealer who talks like an international crime lord and operates out of a small-town reality that never matches his image of himself. The Viper is always trying to get one over on Eddie, and Eddie is always trying to dodge him.

The webisodes are built out of small-town set pieces rather than one continuous story. Eddie owes a grand to Boris, an unseen Russian moneylender who is not shy about claiming body parts as collateral, so Eddie enters a celebrity lookalike contest as Chuck Norris to try to win the €500 prize. There is the "Mitzi Turbo Cup," a local motorsport event treated by the lads with the gravity of a Grand Prix. There is "Foamy Nites," a foam party that becomes one of the series' signature set pieces, the lads flailing through the suds in their best going-out clothes. There is a job interview for a project manager position, in which Eddie, who has never managed anything, talks himself up to a level of absurdity that only he cannot hear. The mock-doc camera follows the lads around town as they drink, smoke, fight, chase women, and look for work without ever quite finding any of it, against the backdrop of the recession hitting rural Ireland.

The nine webisodes found an audience far beyond Mayo. They spread by word of mouth on Facebook and YouTube, and in 2009 RTÉ folded them into its Storyland competition, an online contest aimed at unearthing new comedy and drama talent. Viewers voted, and Hardy Bucks won. The prize was a television commission.

The TV series (2010–2011)

The television version picks up the same lads in the same town, with the same debts and the same dealer, and re-shoots the strongest material from the web series with better cameras and roughly doubled running times. Eddie is still dodging Boris the moneylender, still broke, still scheming. The Viper is still scheming harder. Buzz, French Toast, and Boo are still offering advice that ranges from useless to catastrophic. The series ran for two seasons on RTÉ Two, keeping the improvised, documentary-style feel that made the webisodes work, and keeping the town of Castletown as much a character as any of the lads.

The set piece people remember is the foam party. In "Foamy Nites," the lads head to a nightclub foam event, the kind of night out that promises glamour and delivers chaos. The comedy works because the mock-doc camera stays deadpan while the lads disappear into the foam, their swagger and their clothes ruined in equal measure, each of them convinced he is the one guy in the room who still looks well. It is the series in miniature: big talk, small town, and a night out that ends worse than anyone planned. Alongside it, the Chuck Norris lookalike contest and the project manager interview are the other moments fans quote, each one a full portrait of Eddie's ability to believe his own hype at the worst possible moment.

Characters

Eddie Durkan (Martin Maloney) is the engine of the show. He is broke, boastful, and allergic to honest work, but his schemes and his refusal to accept that Castletown has beaten him give every episode its momentum. Maloney, who co-created the series, improvised much of the role.

Buzz McDonald (Owen Colgan) is the laconic counterweight to Eddie's noise. He says almost nothing, and what he says is funnier for the silence around it.

French Toast O'Toole (Peter Cassidy) is the group's innocent, eager to please and incapable of seeing a bad idea coming, even when he is the one having it.

Boo (Tom Kilgalon) rounds out the four, the quiet hanger-on who is there for every disaster.

The Viper (Chris Tordoff) is the show's standout. He is a small-town weed dealer who talks like a mafia don, and the gap between his self-image and his actual life is the series' richest comic seam. Critics consistently singled him out as the one character who is funny in every scene he is in.

Big Mick Fitzpatrick (Eugene Maloney) and Dannie Cassidy (Eric Montgomery) fill out the town's population of hangers-on, relations, and hangers-on who are also relations. Much of the cast was played by the creators' own friends and family, which is part of why the town feels real.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Hardy Bucks began as YouTube webisodes in 2008, won RTÉ's Storyland in 2009, and became a two-season television series on RTÉ Two from October 2010. In 2013 the lads moved to cinema in The Hardy Bucks Movie, directed by series producer Mike Cockayne on a €300,000 guerrilla-style budget. The film sends Eddie and the lads across Europe to the European Championships in Poland, with a stop in Amsterdam where Eddie and French Toast get on the wrong side of a bar owner and end up coerced into carrying marijuana to Poland. It earned €500,000 at the Irish box office, over €400,000 in the Republic, and almost €100,000 in Northern Ireland, making it the most successful Irish domestic release of 2013. Universal released the film in Britain in November 2013 and in Australia later that year.