Spike TV, the channel for guys who like a high percentage of the things they see to be on fire, premiered Scrappers last night. The series looks at the recently booming scrap metal industry. For me, it’s the first reality show with a basis in my reality. I’ve never danced with the stars or been a bounty hunter, but, well, I kind of love scrapping.
And Scrappers captures what I love about it: The nicked-knuckle frustration and constantly questioning if the job is worth it (“@#!$ getting hurt all day, for a 12-dollar refrigerator?”), the rush when it turns out to be, the people you meet. Oh God, the people you meet.
The show suffers a bit from reality television’s easy out: drama derived from characters’ buffoonery and interpersonal bickering rather than from actual events—always easier to film an argument, which is essentially talk, than to wait it out and capture something happening. So we get a whole segment of fighting over Darren’s mistake of a door not being able to close. But we do get a sense of the hunt. And if anyone who’s ever swung a hammer is wondering why these guys are using vans and not flatbed trucks, it’s because the reality is that scrapping’s largely a jerry-rigged industry. And a lot of the pros who do it are boneheaded amateurs like myself.
Read more via ‘Scrappers’ and the Reality of Being a Junkyard Hound – Culture – The Atlantic.
