It Was The Best of Times, It Was The Worst Of
Times — A Review For Racerchicks.com…
Last Saturday, I stumbled upon
two shows on two different channels that
between them, encompassed everything good and
bad about television. This is not an unusual
occurrence, for it can sometimes happen within
the same show (Fastlane, anyone?) What was odd
though, was that both these shows revolved
around automobiles.
The first program was consisted
of ten hours over two days on the Speed
Channel. The Barrett-Jackson auction in
Scottsdale, Arizona has become an annual
broadcasting event on Speed over the last
couple of years, and it is reality television
at its finest. You had luxury cars, hot rods,
collectible cars and muscle cars being shown
off in all its glory. You had the bidders,
whose motivation would send the auction price
higher. You had the commentators Alain De
Cadenet, Rick DeBruhl, Brock Yates and Bob
Varsha who would describe each car’s
provenance and speculate on whether it would
make its reserve price or not. You even had
celebrity cameos from car guys like Reggie
Jackson and Don Johnson, who managed to push
the final bidding price of his 1971 ‘Cuda
convertible to over $137,000! If the weather
didn’t make you wish you were there, then
maybe the 1970 Camaro Trans-Am race car did.
As far as I’m concerned, Joe Millionaire, The
Bachelorette and Celebrity Mole isn’t worthy
of catching the exhaust fumes of the
Barrett-Jackson auction in terms of “reality”.
The auction didn’t have to manufacture tension
or drama—it’s already there.
Now to the opposite end of the
spectrum. Thunderdome is a new show from TNN,
the former Nashville Network that was bought
by Viacom and re-programmed by a group of ADD
sufferers. This is the same group who don’t
have the attention span to watch basketball or
lacrosse, so they create SlamBall for the 20
milliseconds-and-what-else-is-on? demographic
they are so eager to pursue. To think that
these guys used to broadcast IHRA Drag Racing,
World of Outlaw sprint races and ASA stock car
racing but got rid of it to appeal to the
18-35 IQ demographic makes this show even more
insulting.
This waste of airtime
ostensibly tries to combine some off-road
racing with storylines that were obviously
rejected from Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Racers.
You have your clichéd competitors, for example
The Major (oooh, who’da thunk it, he’s drivin’
a camouflage painted car!) staging these
contrived rivalries with each other while
racing in various indoor and outdoor
locations. According to the production company
Associated Television, “It's "Monster Truck"
meets "Wrestling" in this live action weekly
series. Completely original cars and
characters will clash, smash, bang & crash in
the Thunderdome super events never before
attempted for television.”
That explains everything, in
much the same way “Bridge Out” explains what’s
going to happen to Roscoe P. Coltrane when he
chases after them Duke boys…
The searing pain shooting into
my eyeballs prevented me from watching more
than two minutes at a time, but suffice it to
say, anytime you need to speed up the film to
make the competitors look like they’re driving
faster, that ain’t racing. And I’m sorry, I
know the show is called Thunderdome and all,
but do you think anyone is going to race
wheel-to-wheel on a track where trucks that
have “High Explosives” decals on them are
parked just off the racing line? This steaming
crap-load of television actually makes the WWE
look like “The West Wing” in comparison.
For all the good and bad
programming that I’ve witnessed throughout the
last racing season, I am led to believe that
this is some sort of televised motorsports
karma working across the spectrum, giving us a
Barrett-Jackson auction here, but a
Thunderdome there. A Bullitt here, a Driven
there. A Grand Prix here, but a Days of
Thunder there. Thank goodness for the Speed
Channel, with the exception of their
infomercials, limits the amount of crap that
you’ll have to witness.
Come to think of it, any
infomercial would be better than two minutes
of Thunderdome…
Andre,
a resident of Toronto is a motorsport
addict who isn't interested in any sort of
recovery.
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