By Celine Sparks
American Pickers sounds like something I would tell my kids not to do in public.  It turns out that it’s a growing form of entertainment where you watch people pull over on side roads and scavenge through piles of dirty boat motors and Harley parts.
If you grew up poor and proud of it like we did, the scene is too familiar.  It just kind of looks like Thanksgiving at an uncle’s house, but get this – the stars of the show are trying to buy some of this trash, as in, with money.
An owner cuts through the field in a Bondo-ed four-wheeler, and the negotiations begin.
“How much for this swing set pole?”
“450.”
“I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“Make it twenty-two, and it’s yours.”
They then hop into their van, and talk about how much money they’re going to make.  This is all very interesting, I mean, when compared to the fishing show.
Now it is a fundamental principle of television science that once a show accomplishes a broad viewing (as in the entire membership of the Wrastling Tee Shirts Which Are Just a Hair too Short Collectors International), then other networks follow suit and produce a show which is unbelievably exactly like the other network’s show, but with a different title.
It’s why The Partridge Family was able to succeed because it was exactly like The Brady Bunch, only there was one less kid, the stairs were enclosed, and the mom cut off the flippy curl part of the hairdo.
It’s why America’s Got Talent and The Voice all have three unique (for lack of a better word) judges just like the other show, one of these judges being extremely abrasive, and for some reason, British.
So when it comes to sorting through someone else’s trash and paying for it, the networks caught on quickly, and pretty soon we’re seeing people haggle at pawn stores and fights are breaking out at storage pods over things that can’t be seen because face it, people, the door is closed!  Just saying, that if it’s like most of the storage pods I’ve ever had the horrible lot fall to me to go move the contents of, I’m thinking somebody ought to be on the other side of that door paying you to even take a look.  Think about it.  This thing is filled with the stuff a person does not want seen in his house.  I don’t know what’s in there anymore than the next guy, but if I were a betting woman, ten bucks says it’s a waterbed and a box of puffy Christmas sweaters.  Take a lesson from Lets Make a Deal, people.  Nine times out of ten, when you take what’s behind curtain number one, it’s a goat.
What’s strange to me is that half of these shows are on the History Channel.  When I was in school, history was about being bored to pieces by lots of aristocratic information having to do with tons of Richards and Henrys, and all of them had a beret and a sister named Elizabeth.  Isn’t that kind of what you’d expect to find on a network with history in its name?  I might have made a better grade in history in school if I’d have known it was about riding around in a carpet van and looking at yard sales waiting to happen.
Switch channels to A&E.  Surprisingly enough, this does not stand for attics and  elaborate poker tables.  I believe the channel was originally named Arts and Entertainment, conjuring images of soft ballets and harsh operas, which are true life stories in which everyone sings instead of talking and you can’t understand a word they’re saying and people pay money to attend and shrug, and there is not even any popcorn.  But that’s another article entirely.
Just a little channel surfing, and you soon find out why the “rts” part and the “ntertainment” part were dropped in 1995, and you just have A&E.  Not many ballets.  Not many Italian laments.  Not many field trips to the art museum to see paint splattered on a bent bicycle frame.  When it comes to A&E, it seems we’re more about the E than the A.  This explains why all of America was taken captive, completely mesmerized, by a family of duck hunters who look entirely like ZZ Top.
Hey, did you know the only member of ZZ Top that doesn’t have that long, trollish-looking beard is the drummer named – get this – Kevin BEARD?  Sorry.  Another article again.  But back to the duck thing.
I watched a complete episode of that show because I felt I was the only human alive who wasn’t locked in, and I never saw a single duck.  I saw the same footage over and over of one of the ZZ’s poking an alligator with a stick.  I have lived in the Mississippi swamplands and the Mississippi Delta, so after watching thirty minutes of this kind of thing (and you can watch up to four hours of it in one sitting), one word came to mind:  So?
There’s more.  As you go up and down the channels, you can watch people in all kinds of high pressure decisions:  Flipping houses where we used to watch them flip pancakes; fighting over parking tickets where there used to be parking for fighting tickets.  You can watch auctions and appraisals and stark raving mad women with coupons at the grocery store.  You can watch lots of things that I would walk a block out of the way to avoid in real life.  You can watch them, but when it’s my turn with the remote, I’m going back to The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family.
The only high pressure decision I’m making is this one:  Do I want the mom with the flippy curl, or without?