GET TO THE CHOPPER!!!

Reality shows mar the landscape like bird poop on a field of statues. However, there is one show that represents everything that "reality television" can be (and should be) when all of the stars align and everything is perfect.

"American Chopper" (now called "American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior") premiered last week and within the first five minutes of the first episode I had a surge of adrenaline like the Phillies were about to play a playoff game. This has a great deal to do with the fact that the show format starts off with "last season on 'American Chopper'" and what happened last season was a giant blowout between father and son where Paul Jr. was fired.

But part of it, too, is that judging by the first episode, "American Chopper" is everything reality television can be. Truth is funnier and stranger and more interesting than fiction but most reality shows fail to recognize this and do the exact opposite: take the veneer of reality and script/edit/manipulate it to a bloody pulp. The result - as in my bird analogy - as we've all seen is crap. "American Chopper", when it works, is more like watching sports than episodic television or a sitcom. You care about the characters, you wonder what's going to happen next, you wait with bated breath to see whether they will succeed or fail. And yet, you can't escape the drama and tension - you can't step outside the three walls and simply think that the "writers aren't going to end it that way"; there are no writers, there is no predictable outcome. And you can't dismiss the tension by reminding yourself that "it's just a movie"; it's real people with real problems that can really fail or triumph, they live and breath and can really get hurt. There are no unrealistic twists, no bad actors, no poor sets or cheap special effects. The characters are three dimensional, the action is unpredictable and there are no dei ex machina.

Early last season Paul Jr. was (quite shockingly) fired from a company that he helped create and the television show that documents said company completely flew apart in all directions. The show had always been about the father-son relationship as well as making bikes but after the battle there was no relationship. The plot split in two (Junior/Senior) where Junior thought about starting a boutique (see, you can't write that) and Senior was left to make bikes however he wanted with no real creative process. It turns out that a weekly show about two guys not talking to each other while a drab bike gets built smoothly and easily can be pretty boring and the show was cancelled after it's first truly bad season.

Now, with a lawsuit still pending, Paul Jr. has decided to start up his own shop in direct competition with his father and former business partner. And to help him, he's bringing in a few other former OCC employees that fans of the show will surely recognize - namely Vinny and Nubs. While fans of the show will surely remember these guys, for those who don't, it's like if Mr. T and Hulk Hogan announced that they were going to come back to the WWF for one more tag team match... It would be like that only much less exciting... but then everything in the world is much less exciting than that so my simile is poorly chosen.

But with father and son going head to head, with Paul back designing bikes, with Vinny back building them, with a true underdog vs. Evil Corporation story line, with emotions flaring and people breaking down, with sweet construction montages that include flying sparks, grinding and welding, and as always, really cool motorcycles, it could be an amazing series once again.

It was a little while ago that "Lost" ended and with it a recurring weekly obsession to see the next episode and find out what happens. If the first episode of "American Chopper" is an indication, that terrible torment is back.