Chicago - A message from the station manager

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner

Has the grown-up life you envisioned when you were in high school turned to shit? Can’t get a job because you’re a convicted felon? Is every single boss you work for an insufferable asshole who’s keeping you down? Don’t despair, buckaroo – the fugitive recovery industry has a place for pretty much any loser who still somehow maintains some initiative, some brains, or a clue about how not to jolt yourself with a taser.


Back in the day, the only experience law-abiding folk had to bounty hunters was Robert De Niro’s Jack Walsh and John Ashton’s Marvin Dorfler in the 1988 movie Midnight Run. (Tagline: “Robert De Niro has to get the FBI off his case, the mob off his trail, and Charles Grodin off his back!”) Back then, you had to be a disgraced cop to be a bounty hunter. But that was before Duane “Dog” Chapman and A&E’s Dog The Bounty Hunter came along a few years ago. Duane’s an everyday hero in the sense that when life tries to fuck you nine ways to Sunday (or you spend a lot of time pretty much doing it to yourself), some people with even average intelligence are still able to find a respectable way around it.
Now there’s a new entry in TV bounty hunter field: Wife, Mom, Bounty Hunter on We TV. This program premiered a little more than a week ago, and I saw a few episodes this past weekend. This program follows Sandra Scott, a woman with a past more checkered than a Stacy Adams zoot suit. There’s little in the world that surprises me these days, yet even I can’t figure this show out. Not to mention how people like this get their own show in the first place. In this case, a Phoenix housewife with more aliases than your garden variety street perp (and isn’t even using her real name now) finds her career as a professional wrestler, lesbian, and porn star over, so she becomes a licensed professional bounty hunter. Heck, anything beats ending up as a greeter at the local Wal-Mart, I imagine.
For all intents and purposes, Dog and Mom cover the same ground in the same fashion. Which one of the two is better in terms of compelling bounty hunting is a coin flip, because there’s nothing especially heart-pounding about either program. Fugitive collection seems to involve rounding up people who are too frail, too stupid, or just too plain sick to put up much of a fight. Make no mistake – bounty hunting is a highly dangerous job that can get you killed. (In one episode Saturday, Sandra sees a machete lying on the floor of an apartment shared by scary-looking tweaker bail jumper Victoria and her weathered boyfriend.) But by and large, the derelicts Duane and Sandra round up are meth and crack casualties who couldn’t win a fight with a stiff breeze. So Cops is still the undisputed king of the hill when it comes to portraying what the citizenry is capable of when it gets backed into a corner with drugs down its pants or more alcohol than any liver should be expected to process.
Like Duane Chapman, Sandra Scott has a soft spot for the bail jumpers who end up in the back seat of her bounty hunter minivan. Moms and kids get parting hugs, and tweakers get probably the best meal they’ve had in a month so they don’t starve to death while waiting to get processed at the county jail. But since Sandra doesn’t have Jesus riding point on every bust and apparently doesn’t smoke like Duane, her charges don’t get The Salvation Talk or a cigarette on the way to the lockup. Yet a good amount of conversation does go on on the way to jail, and if we didn’t know any better, you’d think the whole bunch were just carpooling to work in the morning. By the looks of Mom and Dog, you’d think all crackheads and sociopaths were plain friendly folk.
Mom tries to take things a step further than Dog by focusing a major portion of its time on Sandra’s home life. Unlike the often dysfunctional reality of funny car racer John Force of A&E’s Driving Force, Sandra and her family are pretty much plain people living a plain life in a plain suburb. And therein lies the viewing drawback: just because someone puts your family on TV doesn’t automatically make your family interesting. Nor is it any guarantee that the viewing public gives a rat’s ass that your sorta-slacker husband or your two daughters have personal issues that cut into your workday as a bounty hunter. It’s law and order time in America; we want to see some perps getting dragged by their hair out of their hidey-holes. We want to see doors getting kicked in. We want vigilante justice! What we end up with is a lot of concern over who’s going to care for the perps’ pets while they’re figuring out who has enough disposable cash to bail them out of the county jail.
Maybe Sandra Scott should have taken that Wal-Mart greeters job after all; at least we’d get to see some guns.

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Posted on May 1, 2007