If you want to review the big local business stories of the year, go to page 16 of this issue. There you’ll see such entries as the closing of the Dodgers sale and the beginning of the AEG sale. All the year’s important events are there.
But I’m worried that we missed one. I’m thinking of Dave Hester’s lawsuit a couple of weeks ago against A&E’s reality show “Storage Wars.” Hester is the character who bellows “Yuup!” when he bids on that auction show. But he now claims the show’s basically a fake. And that’s a fight that could metastasize and could even rough up L.A.’s economy.
More about that in a minute. First, a confession: I watch reality TV shows. They’re my guilty pleasure.
I don’t enjoy going to movies much, and I don’t care for made-up television shows with their fake relationships and plots and even towns. I don’t want to watch cat videos on YouTube, and I’m not a sports nut. No, when I want to lay waste to a perfectly fine evening with a little mindless entertainment, I switch on some reality TV. Maybe tonight some poor trucker will plunge through the ice road into the frigid lake, I think. Or a professional picker will blow the dust off a lost Monet in a hay loft in Iowa. Or those four obsessive people tromping through the North Woods will finally see an actual Bigfoot. Tell me this isn’t the best entertainment on television.
Take the show about the hog-hunting Campbell family, led by a pot-bellied father with a Texas drawl that’s deeper than the Spindletop well bore. In fact, the show’s producers have to put up captions just so you can understand what he’s saying – and it’s sarcastic and often hilarious. But this guy can sure find elusive feral hogs, or at least his hunting dogs can.
You can’t make this up, and a big part of the appeal of these shows is that they star authentic people with real jobs, and they’re dealing with actual situations with unknown outcomes.
But wait. Now Dave Hester is alleging that the producers on “Storage Wars” sneak valuable and odd items into abandoned storage lockers to boost the drama. (In case you haven’t seen the show, a bidder might spend $200 or $400 to buy a locker crammed with the abandoned detritus of a banal life and then discover a hidden bag of gold.) In other words, Hester is saying this reality show is not exactly real.
As soon as I read the article, I slapped my forehead. Of course. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. I mean, how many people would stuff a locker with stained mattresses and warped particle-board furniture – along with a single, precious antiquity – and then walk away? Well, now that I think about it, not many. But if you believe this show, a lot.
And now, I can’t believe this show. I feel duped, silly for believing it to begin with. And since the news broke about Hester’s claim, I find I can’t bring myself to watch “Storage Wars.” I wonder how many others feel the same.
What’s worse, now I wonder about other shows. Are those scary EVP sound recordings on “Ghost Adventures” just some producer whispering into a microphone?
Here’s the important part: According to FilmL.A., the agency that keeps track of entertainment industry trends, reality TV accounted for almost 40 percent of all permitted filming days in Los Angeles for television shows for the first three quarters of this year. In other words, reality TV is a big part of television production here.
So, if Hester’s lawsuit taints such shows generally, we might look back someday and see this event as the beginning of the end for reality TV.
As for me, well, I’m no sports nut, but I need a little mindless entertainment now and then, so I started watching the Lakers.
A few nights of that, and I switched to the Clippers.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
