Pickers find gems in junk
There’s plenty to pick through on TV this weekend — literally — since both History’s American Pickers and A&E’s Storage Wars are heading into marathon mode. On Saturday, buddies Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz pilfer their way through the U.S. Midwest for eight hours, while the Dotsons auction off lockers on Storage Wars for seven hours on Sunday. That’s a lot of junk to go through. But apparently, junk is the new black (or whatever). If the various spinoffs of Pickers (yes, we have one in Canada) and Wars (Texas has a version and so will New York, come early 2013) are any indication, it’s that we can’t get enough of rooting through other people’s stuff. And unlike their messier cousins Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive, Pickers and Wars find good uses for otherwise useless items.
But while both shows are clearly living a nostalgic American dream — digging up buried treasure and selling it for fast, easy bucks — their approaches are quite different. Pickers is a simple slice of Americana that just happened to hit it big for the ol’ cable network. Wolfe, Fritz and office manager Danielle Colby-Cushman are a fun-loving, humble team who delve deep into the history of the antiques they come across on their travels. Wolfe and Fritz’s friendship stretches back almost as far as their mutual love of picking.
Wars takes the more sensationalist approach of auctioning off the storage lockers of owners who haven’t paid the rent. Equally splashy are its characters, including moneybags Dave Hester, father-son duo Darrell and Brandon Sheets, gloved Jack Nicholson doppelgänger Barry Weiss and bickering married couple Jarrod Schulz and Brandi Passante.
If it sounds like a cast made in Hollywood, well, it just might be, according to Hester. The bidder has recently piped up about the series, saying “yuuup,” it is indeed fake.
Whatever comes out of that ordeal, Storage Wars will likely enjoy success until it naturally runs its course, as will American Pickers — as long as both continue fascinating viewers (these shows garner viewership well into the millions per episode) with how much money can be made from another person’s trash. Because really, that’s what it comes down to: junk. (American Pickers — History, 11 a.m.) (Storage Wars — A&E, 5 p.m., Sunday)
There’s at least one more discarded item up for grabs on Saturday, and that’s the short-lived Fox drama The Mob Doctor. After the already mediocre ratings for the self-explanatory series (Jordana Spiro plays surgical resident Grace Devlin who, yes, works for the Mob) plummeted, Fox is burning off its final four episodes starting with Saturday’s broadcast of Confessions, in which Dr. Devlin tends to a runaway and a priest whose face was bitten during an exorcism. The remaining three episodes air Dec. 31, Jan. 5 and Jan. 7. (Fox — 10 p.m.)