By Scott Buckner
Is famous multimillionaire drag racin’ funny-car driver and confessed marital failure John Force a seething ball of anger who needs professional managing, or does the world just make him fucking nuts? That was the question anyone tuning in to back-to-back episodes of A&E’s Driving Force early Tuesday morning was left to think about.
Even though I don’t catch it anywhere near as often as I’d like, Driving Force is one of my favorite A&E shows. I started watching it last summer because I initially thought John Force was the separated-at-birth twin of whacked-out actor Gary Busey before he crashed his motorcycle while not wearing a brain bucket and ended up even more whacked out. While he’s still and all Busey-esque, Force isn’t the same sort of whack job. He’s an old-school guy who, in his judgement, had the basic misfortune of siring girls to follow in his drag-racing footsteps instead of boys. He’s had cars disintegrate around him, and he’s been on fire after plowing into concrete walls at 300 miles per hour, “but nothing could prepare me for having daughters,” he says during each program intro.
It’s not that he loves his kids (Brittany, 20; Courtney 18; and Ashley, 24) any less because they’re not boys. Instead, his bugaboo is that his personal and professional life happens to be surrounded (and often directed) by his daughters and wife Laurie and their accompanying female issues. Compounding matters is that he’s been separated from Laurie for years and his daughters are all funny car drag-racers who are nowhere near as obsessed as he is with being funny car drag-racers. Oh yeah – and they all work together . . . sort of, because John Force can be an insufferable, hard-headed prick even when he’s trying to do the right thing. Just like Paul Teutul Sr. on The Learning Channel’s American Chopper, a show which features roughly the same quota of Tightly-Wound Yelling Dad getting pissed off because nobody knows how to do ANYfuckingthing right, so the world just makes him fucking nuts.
Or maybe not; maybe John’s just a guy who has a hard time communicating. Or maybe it’s just his steady diet of more stress than even the inventors of Valium ever thought possible in a human being. Either way, a letter from a fan who complained she became upset when John was “talking to your daughters in a loud voice at the track.” Nevermind that drag race tracks tend to be ear-bleedingly loud places where people need to shout, but his brother brings up the possibility that, well, John should think about looking into anger management. What followed was one of those classic Intervention Moments:
John: “You shitting me? You got the balls to say I need to go to management? If my wife told me to go, I’d go because I’m the first one to listen to people.”
Laurie: “You should go.”
John: “Who else is complaining?”
Laurie: “Everyone that knows you.”
So after a lot of bitching about how his personality makes him the go-to guy in the family when crisis arises in the first place (“When that crisis happens, you’re going to wish you had John Force on the job!”) – nevermind that he creates a lot of them – he books an appointment with therapist Dr. Ari. “Maybe this therapy shit can keep my daughters from making me crazy.”
Dr. Ari gets John to find his Happy Place that doesn’t include women and the smell of burning nitro, they talk a bit, and then book an appointment for the whole family because when someone needs anger managin’, it’s helpful to know who’s to blame for the mess – yourself, everyone else, or the whole damn lot of ya.
“I don’t think one session of therapy can describe [my father],” says Ashley. “He’s too screwed up.”
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I watch a lot of TV; consequently, I see a lot of TV commercials. In my estimation, nobody this year been able to come up with a spot better than the priceslessly surreal one for Emerald Nuts featuring Robert Goulet.
Whoever came up with the idea of hvaing Bob waltz through an office eating Post-It notes and kicking over stuff at the desks of napping office workers is a total genius. “Around 3 p.m., when your blood sugar and energy are low, some say Robert Goulet appears – and messes with your stuff. But the natural energy in one handful of Emerald Nuts is enough to keep Robert Goulet away. Until tomorrow, anyway.”
Some may argue that Englebert Humperdinck might have been a better choice, but somehow I get the feeling he doesn’t have Bob’s sense of humor. Or taste for Post-Its.
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See what else the Beachwood TV Affairs Desk has been watching, in the What I Watched Last Night collection.
Posted on May 17, 2007