Talk about taking one for the team: Last night, we sat down and watched a whole rack of clips from A&E‘s Parking Wars, which debuts tonight at 10pm. And we will not hesitate to tell you: It fucking sucked. Even if you don’t live here and do not boil with jihad-like rage every time you see the letters P, P and A in sequence, it still fucking sucked. Problem one: There are no sympathetic characters here. Not the drones out on the street writing tickets, certainly not you, the disgruntled man on the street trying to wrangle out of tickets, not anybody. Problem two: As you no doubt know, these are not really the brightest people in the world. There’s a reason people work for the Parking Authority, and these reasons are never usually good — low SAT scores, inability to fully grasp the tenets of birth control, love of paltry amounts of authority, you get where I’m going with this. But unlike a show like, say, Wife Swap, where the show’s producers articulate their hatred of the subjects by letting them hang themselves, Parking Wars seems to lack the balls to do even this. Meanwhile, you’re stuck with PPA rank and file talking into the camera, telling you all about how everything I just said about them isn’t true, how they’re really just like you and me. Sounds fun, right? Problem three: It’s a reality TV show about the Philadelphia Parking Authority.
I think we’re done here.
ParkingWars: From The Minds That Brought You “Intervention” Now Comes A Show About The Worthless, The Hopeless And The People Who Want Them To Die

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 12:33 pm.