I Bet You / Ice Road Truckers: On And Off The Ice / Parking Wars: The Best Of Season One
Cable television used to hold the promise of uncut
Hollywood movies, live sporting events, and all the Superstation repeats of Petticoat
Junction
a household could stand. Now, decades after the cable revolution, some of us
spend our evenings and weekends watching gamblers make stupid bets, truckers
haul oversized loads on frozen rivers, and meter maids argue with ticketed
drivers. And honestly? It's not so bad.
I Bet You: Season 1 contains nearly 10 hours
of poker stars Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari roaming the streets, wagering over
who can get the most hugs from strangers, master the basics of surfing in an afternoon,
or coach a YMCA basketball team to victory. The entertainment value of I Bet
You has
little to do with who wins or loses; it's all about the odd-couple pairing of
the gregarious, goofy Laak and the shrewd, wiry Esfandiari, and their running
patter of trash-talk, second-guessing, and nitpicking. It's fun to watch Laak
do just about anything, but especially when he's impulsively yelping, "It's a
crush, kid! I'm crushing you!"
Similarly, History Channel's series Ice Road
Truckers
is addictive not because fans expect to see a big rig crack the ice and sink
into icy water, but because the people engaged in arctic freight-hauling are
such outsized characters. Each year, veteran truckers brave subzero
temperatures and the dangers of iced-over bodies of water to deliver equipment
to mines and oil wells in extreme northern Canada, and in the process, they
swear a lot, get on each other's nerves, and gripe about every minor equipment
failure or bureaucratic snafu. Ice Road Truckers: On And Off The Ice consists of three special
episodes that probably should've been tacked onto the first-season DVD set, but
for the uninitiated, the disc offers a fair introduction to a dangerous job and
the gruff folks who do it.
Then again, what's more dangerous: unstable
driving surfaces, or disgruntled Philadelphians? In the tradition of
docu-series like Cops and Airline, which ask viewers to identify with the harried
service people and low-level authority figures who ordinarily ruin our days, Parking
Wars
takes us behind the scenes with the men and women of the PPA. A third of each
episode is dedicated to the ticketing beat, a third is about the long lines of
irritated citizens at the municipal tow lot, and the final third follows the
process of giving cars "the boot." Of course, there's innate drama in watching
people get irritated, but as with the best time-wasting cable shows, the eight
half-hour episodes on the Parking Wars: The Best Of Season One DVD offer a twisted kind
of wish-fulfillment. We step into the shoes of the guys and gals with the
ticket-pads in their hands, and live vicariously through their ability to make
life hell for people who probably deserve to be left alone.
Key features: Negligible bonus footage on each.