De Plane, Boss! De Plane!

I can luckily say that I have never come close to having any of my possessions repossessed. I can only imagine it is terribly embarrassing and some really unfortunate things must have happened to put those people in that situation because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt that they would normally be willing to pay their bills. The good news is that things appear to be getting better economically and fewer people are in that type of financial crunch. However, you wouldn't get that impression from the vast number of shows currently on television about repossessing cars. If my cable guide is to be believed there are cars being hauled away every moment and every single repossession is a very dramatic event. They have to be planned more thoroughly than your average casino robbery, which makes the fact the repo teams bringing along a camera crew who use bright lights and manage to always capture the best angles kind of hard to believe. On top of that no one is willing to let their car go easily and while these people can't afford to pay for their car they apparently can make their cellphone payments to call the cops without any problem. (At least if you land on the right show they give you the chance to win your car back by answering trivia.) At this point these shows are so similar they have started to blend together which is why I was happy to see Discovery, the kings of fake reality, step it up a notch by slightly altering the format.

The other night I caught a few episodes of a new (to me anyway) program called "Airplane Repo." As you probably guessed from the incredibly boring title, the show is still about repo men but instead of the normal car or house, these guys go in and repossess expensive toys from people and companies who stopped paying for them. They will go after everything from yachts to jets, but so far I have only seen them go after airplanes and every episode of the mini-marathon on TV held to a certain formula: the repo men have to track down the airplanes, it never goes quite as smoothly as they hope and there are some tense moments when it looks like they won't get the plane, but in they end they fly them out and then the client gives them 10% of whatever the plane is re-sold for. (Just as an aside, even though I am not in the market for a plane at the moment I want to know where these guys sell their planes because the prices they quote seem like a heck of a deal. One guy said the jet they seized would go for $180,000. Doesn't that seem kind of cheap for an airplane?) Sadly, after you get over the sizzle factor of watching someone taking away a really expensive toy from a 1%-er the show still employs the usual fake-reality show tricks of dramatic music and well-timed commercial breaks to create drama where none actually exists.

Normally I would put the odds of any reality show being fake at around 85%. And while this show is entertaining enough, the reason I don't see it lasting longer than one season is that it feels like the odds everything on this show is being staged should be closer to 95%. The problem is that they keep trying to act as if they are basically stealing these planes back and need to take off without arousing too much suspicion, but that sort of thing just isn't possible. Your average viewer has probably been around an airport since 2001 and thus we know there is no way you are getting near an airplane let alone taking off with it unless you have all the paperwork in hand and clearance to be there. The very concept of stealing an airplane is ludicrous. The only good part is that at least the producers are aware of this and don't totally insult our intelligence by at least acknowledging that the pilots do all the pre-flight checklist, which I happen to know takes at least a half an hour. Plus, I don't care how dramatic the music is, the illusion you are up against a clock, trying to be stealthy, not drawing attention to yourself and need to move before the cops arrive is harder to believe when the ground crew is coming out to help gas the plane up. Other than sticking a repossession notice on the plane I'm sure it is no different from any other flight that takes place that day.

Now, I have no doubt that airplane repossession is a real job and that these guys have had more than their share of run-ins with angry plane owners who don't want their property to be taken away. Thus, it is more likely that a few of these are more like dramatic reenactments than reality TV. (The opening credits show a guy getting arrested. Amazingly the police didn't also demand the camera crew get on the ground and they got some really good shots of the whole arrest. How lucky.) By the way, if this show is entirely fake I'm fine with it. These shows are just meant to provide entertainment. I know technically you could argue it's a type of fraud, but as long as they aren't asking people to send in money to help a sick person who isn't really sick afford medicine or make people believe the show is a fair competition when has actually been pre-determined than I say they fake away. It is still better than your average "Real Housewives" franchise. I just wish they didn't feel the need to insult our intelligence this badly by calling it a reality show. Honestly, if the story is good enough we will watch it even if it didn't really happen that way. It's called fiction and TV used to work under that premise all the time (and should again, if you ask my opinion). But if they don't quite want to reclassify the show as fiction they could at least call it an educational show, because at least I learned the price of planes has come way down in the last couple of years.