There are quite a number of them that I rather enjoy, but it seems like they are part of a huge trend in reality programming.
Here’s a list off the top of my head of ones currently airing:
Antiques Roadshow (the grand daddy of them all)
Cash in the Attic
Pawn Stars
Hardcore Pawn
American Pickers
Auction Kings
Auction Hunters
Storage Wars
Hollywood Treasures
American Restoration
Again, that is just off the top of my head and so I might have forgotten some. Is the economy so bad that TV audiences find a lot of entertainment watching shows about things they can’t afford to buy?
Part of the fun of Antiques Roadshow is imagining that your old crap is secretly a rare antique - I find myself side-eyeing the dresser or the coffee table and wondering if some man with a nice accent might one day tell me that it is worth thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Not only is there high audience interest due to the sort of hopeful identification (perhaps projection) that **multimediac17 **mentions, these shows are also very cheap to produce - no sets, no actors, no writers (just like much of “reality TV”) and since they’re not trying to make much of a “story”, editing is a quick and low cost, too. Any genre that’s cheap to produce and attracts an audience will find plenty of producers willing to finance another similar show.
Yeah, I totally get that they are cheap to produce but it just seems rather odd that this subset of the reality show genre has really taken off recently. I think the success of Pawn Stars really helped to spur other networks to produce knockoffs in an attempt to score a hit show as well.
The really bad aspect of it is that the newer shows are really obviously staged for the most part. The worst offender is Auction Hunters, which is so fake that they even hired an established actor and TV host to be one of the two leads. Reality, my ass…
As someone who grew up with antique-dealer / collector parents, and as someone who spent MANY a weekend morning getting up at “way too fucking early for a kid” o’clock with my dad to go to flea markets, garage sales and collector’s fairs, it is just…interesting, to see this world I know so well portrayed on these shows and evolve because of it.
The world of collecting and dealing was much more insular - no different than folks finding each other online who share medical conditions, sexual proclivities, geeky interests, etc.
…and it was a lot easier to find a hidden gem back then ;):mad:
I didn’t know it was a genre now, but I’ve seen Antiques Roadshow. It’s watchable.
The other part of the appeal is that it’s kind of like a quiz show that you can play along with at home. You see the item, take a wild guess at what a collector might pay for it, and then find out how closely your appraisal matches the actual appraisal.
TV producers have no imagination at all, TV networks are cheap, and most reality programs only work when they are spiced up with made-up nonsense. When the producers see some idea (like having people search for bargains among junk) works for one show, they immediately decide that they can make a knock-off of it. So there are always a bunch of very similar knock-off programs being pitched to the TV networks at any time. It’s no more and no less surprising that there are a lot of bargain hunter reality shows than that there were a lot of cake-making shows or any of the other reality show trends. The producers convinced the networks that this was a good idea and that they could make the shows cheap because you don’t have to hire good actors or good writers for them. Of course, what usually happens is that it quickly becomes clear that the show is a bad idea, so they hire writers to create artificially quirky situations and perhaps hire some actors who know what they’re doing as host or such.
Here’s a chance to slip in a synopsis of one of my favorite ‘picker’ stories, an old short story by Roald Dahl. In his story, a snotty antiques collector from NYC used to drive out in the country, look at valuable old furniture in farmhouses, buy it for a song, take it home, and resell it for a huge profit. He comes upon two brothers on a farm who own the finest piece of wood furniture he’s ever seen! Beautifully made, in beautiful condition, worth a fortune! Our snotty dealer is ultra cheap, offers to take it off their hands for a few dollars, claims the table (or dresser) as an antique is just OK, but not that good, and he can always chop it up and use it for kindling, ha-ha! There is suspense here, the brothers are wary and try to up the price, but the dealer insists it’s really not worth that much. They arrive on a price, and the brothers watch the dealer fairly skip down the road to his truck, to bring it around so they can put the dresser on the back…and he brings the truck around and gets a big old surprise from the helpful farmers…
My favorite of these shows is Antiques Roadshow. An interesting thing about AR - I read a book or article about an unfortunate woman who lived with chronic, non-stop pain, who tried everything to relieve it from drugs to acupuncture to meditation. At the end of the book, she said when she came home from work she would lie on the couch sniffing lavendar oil and watching the Antiques Roadshow, and this soothed and calmed her and made her feel a little better. It is a nice show, interesting and interspersed with happy moments. Makes you want to go look in the attic for the 100th time, looking (in vain) for some valuable piece of junk to just sort of appear, and jump out at you!
I think you’re probably right. And I think Pawn Stars is a hit because it’s cheap to produce and people watch it. People watch it because they want to identify with the people who have unknown treasures. And because Chumlee is so friggin’ hilarious - the perfect real world example of the Wise Fool, a classic character predating Shakespeare.
Antiques Roadshow has been running since 1979; 1997 for the American produced version. Cash in the Attic premiered in 2002. They were popular during the glory days of online auctions when people really were fairly regularly finding stuff in their attic or at garage sales that they could sell on ebay for hundreds of dollars. Those days are pretty much gone, with a few rare exceptions, since the antiques and collectibles market has been glutted, but people still dream big.
If you listen to the guys on American Pickers, they’re not finding stuff to sell to the masses, they’ve almost always got “a guy” who’s interested in a particular item they pick. Their profit comes from relieving schlubs who don’t know what they’ve got (or don’t know “the guy” who’s willing to pay for it) of their items and selling to a very niche market…but even there, most of their stuff doesn’t get them even 200% of what they bought it for.
And, really, the economy probably has something to do with the rise of the pawn ones. Once upon a time, only the destitute person pawned stuff. Now it’s becoming distressingly common for people who once considered themselves middle class, so the stigma of pawn shops is fading fast.
The one I absolutely find very hard to watch is Hardcore Pawn. The guy who runs the shop is a grade-A sleezebag and most of the customers are downright destitute, after all it is in Detroit. A lot of the customers are downright a-holes as well. The whole show is like a half an hour of pure misery and chaos. The whole TruTV lineup seems to be designed from the ground up to appeal to the lowest common demnominator.
and yes, since the dealer told them he only needed the legs and the rest was only good for firewood (trying to get the whole thing cheap), the three country men removed the legs and chopped the rest up for firewood.
My very limited experience of watching shows of this type–three or four show fragments, don’t know which shows–suggests that the folks selling to the show’s buyers are not being paid big bucks. In every single case I saw, I thought the sellers were getting screwed. I was shocked that people would part with what I’d think of as family heirlooms for a lousy hundred bucks or something.
So it seems to me that part of the appeal must be smugly watching suckers getting taken. But for me, while I’m not above enjoying a clever con getting the best of someone who seems to deserve it, these scenarios all came off as sad: hopeful regular folks, trustingly revealing their treasures to the experts, who proceeded to rob them.
Having worked in a comic book/collectibles shop I can tell you that for the most part, these people selling items to pickers and pawn shops are getting pretty fair treatment. Especially Rick on Pawn Stars, who goes out of his way to tell people the fair retail price for their items. What most people don’t understand is that half of retail is pretty fair for most things because you don’t know how long it will sit on a shelf and then you have overhead and staff wages to pay for. At the end of the day, you aren’t buying something from somebody to be benevolant…you are doing it because you are running a business and ultimately you hope to make some type of profit.
