If nothing else, the return of TruTV’s “Hardcore Pawn” is appropriately timed to the grimness that can sometimes accompany the time after Christmas. As trees are dragged out to the garbage and consumers are dragged out to the mall to exchange unwanted presents and to binge on gift cards, the world sort of resembles one big reality show.
“Hardcore Pawn,” in a small way, reminds us just how much worse things can be when it comes to the ancient arts of transaction, usury and the time-honored disdain between vendor and customer.
But that’s also lending far too much thematic bling to this show. Back for a second season (even though its first season ended mere months ago), “Hardcore Pawn” is a cheap, depressing, even unctuous exercise that raises all sorts of concerns that it never addresses about the real biggies: class, race, ethnicity, money, family.
Ostensibly about the crazy day-to-day life at American Jewelry and Loan — a large, family-run pawnshop on Detroit’s storied 8 Mile Road — “Hardcore Pawn” is preoccupied with all the wrong story lines that take place on the wrong side (the safe side) of the Plexiglas.
The show centers on the ironically named owner, Les Gold, a true-to- stereotype pawnshop owner with a mustache and a balding mini-mullet of curls, and Les’s wife, Lili, adult children, Seth and Ashley, and a few of the trusted employees.
It also revels in the general malaise of Detroit, as a steady stream of unlucky customers waft in and out, hoping either to pawn their goods or to benefit from the misfortune of those who’ve pawned past the point of no return. Les seems to enjoy the possibility that anything and everything is for sale, talking the sad sellers down in price. This includes the desperate offering of a seemingly deranged man who tries to pawn a DVD player that, the man babbles, is “a transistor that communicates with aliens!”
“Show me,” Les says, hoping to at least acquire a DVD player for $10.
“You done broke it,” the man screams and demands retribution.
Actually, what the man is demanding (and receiving) is a few seconds of TV time, which culminate in Les having him tossed out of the store by one of the bouncers. Everyone in American Jewelry and Loan, whether customer or employee, mugs for the camera and shows us what they’ve learned about watching “Cops.”
The way the show is made all but obstructs a possibly better premise: Perhaps the activities within any American pawnshop could tell us something new about . . . well, there’s the problem. The pawnshop has become this recession’s easiest cliche setting.
The new season of “Hardcore Pawn” begins at 8 p.m. Tuesday on TruTV.
