If you broaden the definition of American exceptionalism to include rooting through the contents of abandoned storage units or spending your last few dollars to trot off to the Alaskan wilderness to backhoe for gold, then America is looking mighty exceptional indeed. At least on television.
A&E’s Storage Wars (which had its premiere Wednesday and will be repeated at 11 p.m. Saturday) and Discovery’s Gold Rush (premiering today at 10 p.m.) are really just further ruminations on the perceived crises of national masculinity and consumer confidence.
Both shows feature a gang of frustrated, fringy, tattooed, middle-age men on a hunt for easy wealth — or a last stab at financial security. Both shows also have their moments of absorbing drama and distasteful levels of bull-headedness, set against an American backdrop that seems mere steps away from the full-on, Cormac McCarthy-style apocalypse.
In Storage Wars, we follow several men (and one woman, who is married to one of them) who attempt to make their living by chasing auctions at storage-unit facilities in dusty Southern California burbs. Here, under a blazing sun in the Great Recession’s land of extreme foreclosures, an auctioneer cuts off the lock of unlucky units where the fee has gone unpaid for at least 90 days.
Storage Wars portrays the misery of others as a twisted opportunity for the rest of us to get a leg up.
Storage Wars seems like a spa day compared to the misery and depressing ineptitude seen in Gold Rush, which depicts the almost Homerian journey of Todd Hoffman, a 41-year-old Oregon man, and his obstinate 65-year-old father, Jack, who sell everything they own (not much) and convince five other men to leave their families and accompany them to southeastern Alaska, where they’ve leased 160 acres to hunt for gold. “Like my forefathers did,” Todd says. “They manned up and they went into the frontier.”
The men are lured there by the current $1,200-an-ounce gold prices. They all agree to work without pay for an entire summer for the chance to share in the gold they hope to find, and to also share in whatever dubious fortune being on TV may bring.
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