I like shows that are about people with abilities doing what they do, not about people for their drama quotient. Some of them get a little repetitive (various logging/swamp/gator shows) and I drop them after a few episodes. I stick with the ones that have different goals every episode (American Chopper, Sons of Guns, Top Shot.) I can watch the OCC guys weld and fabricate bike after bike for some reason.
H.
Tabatha is totally butch, trust me.
Besides it said no dating or dancing shows!
Phil: on the auction/haggling side of things, I understand where you’re coming from in the salted lockers thing. You may like Auction Hunters. Rather than some contest between storage unit buyers, it’s about two guys who work together buying units, and the show documents there rarest finds. They explicitly state that 80% of the units they buy are duds.
On the failing restaurant front, I’ve always enjoyed Restaurant Makeover which is a Canadian program that is no longer being produced, but may still be available in re-runs. I’ve even dined at some of the made-over restaurants. Some good. Some no so much.
Discovery Canada also has a pair of “Worst X” programs that I enjoy. I guess it’s trainwreck television. Canada’s Worst Drivers is amazing in how some people managed to get driver’s licenses. Canada’s Worst Handyman is similar, but feature people who are a menace to themselves with power tools.
Bar Rescue is the same deal with bars.
Also, Football, Baseball, Basketball…
I couldn’t take Sons of Guns anymore. There’s not enough fabrication and very little payoff from the shooting content. I read the description on my DVR and think about how cool that episode would be. Then I realize it will only disappoint me. I know this comes with the territory, but Top Shot is so much better (complaints from the Enos crowd notwithstanding).
I also normally love rednecks but those guys mostly annoy me.
I like Auction Hunters and I used to like Pawn Pawn stars, but I have gotten tired of that one. Basically I like the ones that are just remakes of Antiques Road Show, mostly because I like Antiques Road Show.
I also like Gold Rush, moslty because that guy is the most infectiously optomistic moron I have ever seen. One line from the end of season one pretty much sums it up. He says something like “we proved that you can still do stuff like this in America” to which my response was, “yes, it is still possible to spend $250K digging a hole in the ground”.
Amongst those not already listed, I like Oddities. Not sure how “manly” it is, but it’s definitely not womanly. The “scriptedness” factor is fairly high, but the staff of the shop are likeable enough, and you get to boggle at a different group of freakazoid customers every episode.
Not sure if it counts as reality, but I’ve recently started going through the entire British run of Time Team. Digging around in the dirt and using expensive equipment is definitely manly.
What I wonder about Pawn Stars and Antiques Road Show and the like is, “Who are the end buyers?”
Who wants these pricey antiques, old things associated with minor celebrities, or 200 year old bits of ceramic from some place you’ve never heard of?
I was watching Pawn Stars and they were haggling over an antique duck press. I assume the end buyer would not likely be buying it for functional purposes. So you’ve got an old, large, kinda cool looking bit of quasi-machinery. I could see someone paying maybe $200 for it, but IIRC, the pawn shop was offering $1500 and the seller was asking $6K (not sure if it ultimately sold or at what price).
I mean, old stuff, be it outdated machinery, old artsy stuff, or whatever, just doesn’t seem that rare to me. And I wonder if there is enough of a market to actually pay the high prices that float around these shows.
On American Pickers, the one guy seems to like rusty old bikes, and the other guy likes old oil cans. How much of a market is there for this stuff?
It’s low on content but I enjoy the fantasy of having that sort of shop and getting to build that stuff. I kinda enjoy the Cletus factor too, since they’re coonass rather than hillbilly.
Yeah, I wonder the same thing Phil, but then I remember that there are people out there who will pay $150 for a single Magic card. So yeah, I’m sure there are nutters who will buy rusty bikes and old oil cans too.
Speaking of which, we need a reality show about an arcade cabinet builder, or custom controllers and consoles. Ben Heckendorn can have dramatic reality TV show conflicts about movies and comic books or something.
Survivorman did indeed run its course, and I haven’t seen any of the Survivordudes episodes with Les+somebody, but for anybody that hasn’t seen them, start at Ep1 and go! :D
I seem to recall he had to give it up since it was slowly killing him. Unlike certain fake experts (Grylls, I’m looking at you) he was really in the shit during those shows, pretty much starving for days on end.
H.
Iron Chef America
One anecdata-- the American Pickers recently went to my hometown, Easton, PA and went through our old amusement park, Bushkill Park, where I have many happy memories from childhood. This place had one of the oldest carousels in the world (since sold to some other park), but it’s been slowly rotting there for years.
I took my wife there a few years ago, because she loves to take pictures of decrepit Americana, and we snuck around and she took pictures.
Anyway, the Pickers bought a bunch of stuff, and then found out the stuff was worth a whole lot more than they thought.
So they came back and gave the Bushkill Park guy more money.
Yep. Les Stroud doesn’t have fake grizzly bears on his show, nor does Stroud stay at a motel when he’s supposedly stranded on a deserted island.
Time Team because there is a lot you can learn from watching it. Quite interesting.
All business recovery show with Ramsay’s UK restaurant rescue one the best. You got a sense it was the real Ramsay back then, and he genuinely wanted to help, not the shouty cartoon we see now.
Also, sometimes they wouldn’t take his advise and the business would have failed in the followups. Seemed more realistic.
That’s it!
That is absolutely correct, and though I’ve gone much longer than him several times over without nutrition, it is terrible what it does to your body. You spend weeks (for myself - months) recovering from a week or two with no nutrition. I could tell by the last few shows he was losing the ability to ramp himself up psychologically for his (6-7) days of little food.
This is why I despised Bear Gyrlls from the onset as he would supposedly be without food/water for 2 days yet he could energetically hop around with a smile, run up hillsides, & climb trees like a well-fed monkey. So fake and it was infuriating he was not only deceptive, but outright lied to people. I’d watched his special on the French Foreign Legion where he goes on about his time in the British Special Forces and the value of integrity, hard work, and honesty. A bunch of crap. He would have continued to deceive people in “Man vs. Wild” if he hadn’t been outed.
Personally, I can’t watch reality shows where people are getting taken advantage of. Too many of these shows make no light of the stars trouncing someone down on their luck, and promoting individual greed and discourse amoungst companions. I just don’t understand it. If it’s warranted since the individual is a real jerk that’s fine… but it seems too often it’s not.
I’d like a reality show where everyone works together, they never fight, are very selfless without being fake, and work for the greater good. Is there something like that out there?
Have you watched Time Team? It’s a bit of a different flair, as it’s more documentary than drama, but it’s very much that: a bunch of archaeologists and other specialists go some place for 3 days and work together trying to find out as much as they can about some archaeological question in that brief amount of time.
I recently caught a couple episodes of something called Operation Repo, following a family that repossesses stuff. Its authenticity is…highly debatable (from what I gather, it’s reenactments of thing that they claim happened), but it’s got that trashy dumb-people-doing-dumb-stuff vibe.