If you roll the dice and park your car illegally in Sin City, odds are you're going to lose that bet.
That's the motto for the new US Reality TV series Sin City Tow, set in Las Vegas, and starring a variety of tow-truck drivers, gamblers, and other eccentrics of every stripe.
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - sometimes that means your car," quips the owner of one of the two competing businesses, Ashley's Towing, at the heart of the story - such as it is.
This is the latest reality show to audition for a place in my affections since the unfortunate demise of Ice Road Truckers (11 series: 2007-17) after the tragic death of series regular Darrell Ward. I followed that one up with the Canadian show Heavy Rescue: 401 (7 series: 2016-23) which plumbed not dissimilar territory: the adventures - and misadventures - of hardworking truckers in North America's frozen wastes.
Alas, much though I'm enjoying Sin City Tow, I'm not sure that it will ever reach a second series, given the largely negative commentary it's been getting online - mainly from disgruntled car-owners who've had their vehicles towed, I suspect. Still, 85% of viewers are listed as having "enjoyed" it on Google, so there's some hope left.
I guess what I like most about it is what various of the other commentators dislike: the melodramatic heightening of fairly trivial events, and the narrative shaping that all this raw footage has undergone. The drivers themselves are not really a particularly likeable crew, but then, a dose of that good old Repo Man spirit is no doubt a sine qua non in their profession:
"See, an ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."
Let's look at a few of those IMDb User Reviews, then:
... With reality TV shows, there is always the question of possible staging. I must say I do not believe Sin City Tow is guilty of this.The contention that the towing companies might simply be out to make a profit rather than nobly crusading to clean up the unruly streets of Las Vegas is a disturbing one. Next they'll be claiming that the casinos don't stay open simply to redistribute wealth to the starving masses, but rather to pile up profits for their corporate owners!
The reason being in the considered opinion of a person who has watched many and varied such series (me) is the following. The people in the confrontations are usually blanked out, their faces that is. With staged scenes, the "actors" are in on it, being paid for their performances, ergo no blanking out. So this is why I believe things are on the up and up.
... There is something to give pause. Are the towing companies seizing vehicles for the sake of making a buck rather than keeping parking in Vegas orderly and under control? Sometimes this does seem that this might be the case ...
The point about the blanked-out faces is interesting. Given we see so many cameramen hovering around randomly in most of the scenes, I must confess it hadn''t occurred to me that anyone might have gone to the trouble of staging it that way. Hand-held camera blurring and shakiness is one thing, but surely any kind of fakery would come out looking a bit more polished?
The next commentator clearly doesn't agree, though (given the title of their review):
Dime a dozen fake reality TV show.That last paragraph sounds like a real cri-de-coeur to me. I fear that this writer has had the experience of recommending such a show to friends, only to hear them chortling behind his back. I feel his pain. I've heard more than a few such snorting noises myself from people who refuse to believe that a self-styled "uppity intellectual" such as I could actually be serious about my passion for Ice Road Truckers (and its ilk).
Have a friend that is a tow operator, so I caught some episodes of this while at their place.
Immediately obvious that this is another one of those "reality" shows which grew in popularity in the early-mid 2000's. And by reality I mean a show in which they stage a bunch of unbelievable scenarios for the tow truck drivers and employees, most of which consist of the drivers and agitators taking turns on upping each other's poor acting skills.
Other than the poor acting, there are also endless laughable confrontations and "Only in Vegas!" moments throughout. How laughable you ask? On their Halloween themed episode a driver stumbles upon an allegedly real Satanic ritual site, with a dead pig strung up and mutilated.
I won't claim there's 0 entertainment to be found in shows like this, but please do yourself a favor and don't recommend them to friends, unless you want them snickering behind your back because you believe that they're real.
In fact, when we were playing one of those silly "who-would-you-most-like-to-have-lunch-with" games, it took me quite a while to explain why Ice Road trucker Lisa Kelly would be my ideal choice. There'd be so much to talk about!
Please don't give these scammers any recognition. I can't speak for the practices of all the tow truck companies, but Ashley's Towing, run by Shawn Davis, is wreaking havoc on the local residents of Las Vegas. It might be entertaining when it's a drunk guy on the strip, but when they illegally tow private home owners' and apartment renters' vehicles from right in front of their homes, it's not funny at all. No one calls these in, the tow trucks prowl the subdivisions and complexes at night for easy prey. They then extort these innocent victims for hundreds of dollars to release their vehicles from the private impound lots. After contacting the police and attorneys, it becomes evident that the scam Ashley's Towing is running is minor enough to fly under the radar of both our criminal and civil justice systems. Even though if you add up all the victims and hundreds of dollars, it's grounds for a class action lawsuit.I got my car towed once. I had a date in the centre of town with the lady who would eventually become my wife, and I couldn't find a park anywhere. I eventually took a chance on some reserved spaces outside an apartment complex, hoping that I'd get back before the tenants did. Alas, I miscalculated. Much of the rest of the night was spent ringing the police, then a taxi, then paying an exorbitant fee at a tow yard. I gambled and lost, and was appropriately punished.
Before you support this nonsensical show, think about the honest people who rely on their cars either for work or to get to work, walking out their front door to realize their vehicle is gone. Then imagine them realizing they might lose their job if they don't have their vehicle. Or imagine the folks who can't afford to pay the several-hundred-dollar impound fee but need their vehicle to support their family.
If you live in an apartment anywhere - not just Las Vegas - and fail to pay the prescribed fee for your parking, or to display the parking permit correctly, you'll probably get towed. It's hard to see this as grounds for a "class action lawsuit", as the commentator above threatens. Good luck with that, is all I can say.
•
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
- Shakespeare, As You Like It, II: vii.Here are a few of the principal actors in the comedy:
I'd have to concede that there is something a little disconcerting about the glee with which drivers such as Jeremy (above) pounce on their victims. But then, he did spend most of his formative years pouring concrete for a living, so I imagine he feels that this new lifestyle of his is something of a rest cure. He's unabashedly out for the cash.
The rather unfortunately nicknamed "Pineapple", from American Samoa, is more of a dispassionate technician. He tows away big rigs which have outstayed their welcome at truck stops, which requires a great deal of skill and expertise. He's not interested in confrontation, but - given he towers above most of the drivers who take him on - he won't back away from it either.
NB: It was he who, in their Halloween themed episode "stumbled upon an allegedly real Satanic ritual site, with a dead pig strung up and mutilated" in the back of a truck, as one of the commentators above mentioned. I'd like to think it was staged by the producers for a gag, but given the things they find in some of the other cars they tow, it's hard to be sure.
Elmer, by contrast, is rather more of a tragic figure. Things never quite go his way. He finds a rich crop of cars, and then is forced to abandon them by an order from home base. He's deputed to shepherd through cars at the weekly auction of abandoned vehicles - an unpaid gig - instead of being out on the streets collecting towing fees. The cars he does tow end up getting damaged, or have to be left behind for one reason or another. He attracts bad luck, despite all his desperate efforts to get ahead.
And yes, there's more than a hint of the commedia dell'arte about the exaggerated clashes of temperament and style in these various knights of the road - and when you throw in the excessive and disproportionate rage displayed by some of the punters coming to the yard to pick up their cars, you begin to verge on Jacobean Revenge Tragedy. "You have to get off sometime," as one woman mouths to the receptionist asking to see the ID and registration she's failed to bring with her. "I'll be waiting."
One thing all of them have in common is a terror of the cops. The mere threat of calling the police is enough to make the most belligerent hoodlum back off from threatening the driver who's just impounded their car. I gather that there's a policy in the US that every call-out of this kind must conclude with an arrest - it's just a question of who ends up in handcuffs. And then there's the added fillip of possibly getting shot if you show any signs of reaching for a weapon (or even looking as if that might be on your mind).
The obvious reading of this programme, then, is as a barometer of American life at its most grotesque and self-parodic. And certainly, in times such as these, it's hard to avoid the feeling that things have deteriorated considerably since Hunter S. Thompson made his own journey to the heart of darkness of the American Dream in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972).
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid ot the pain of being a man."- Dr. Johnson
Thompson's existential despair has been replaced by a more banal wasteland of parking lots and cheap housing units: the darkness on the edge of town (in Springsteen's phrase) has been traded in for six-lane highways petering out in arid nowhere. These towies seem, at times, as futile and hapless as Wall-E robots, trying vainly to clean up an endlessly spreading (and self-renewing) stain on the landscape.
Can we - as a species - survive much more of this? I guess that remains to be seen. After all, as Ian Wedde put it in his great ecological anthem "Pathway to the Sea":
... we know, don’t we,
citizen, that there’s nowhere
to defect to, & that
living in the
universe doesn’t
leave you
any place to chuck
stuff off
of.
