Comic book men

i like the show, yes its very stereotypical, and anything besides the actual buying/selling of collectors items is often very cheesy and pointless, but the whole collectors item thing is just oddly fascinating to me.

I watched the first two season and still fail to see what the draw is that keeps folks watching.

Very mundane and formulaic in my mind.

The first season, in which the episodes were an hour (well, 40 minutes of show plus 20 of commercials, anyway), was fun, and vastly better than what's come since. It's become tough to watch, and schlocky, so gimmicky, and i've just about given up on it. The Ice Cream Truck episode from this season was pretty much the extremely hard to watch straw on this camel's now-broken back.

* I love Bryan, and Ming's alright, seems like a good guy, but Mike and Walt are tough to stomach much of the time to say the least. Personal opinion, as is all of everything I say.

* The scripted bits are outright painful, be it a sketch, or an interaction at the counter where someone's trying to sell or buy something. I can't stand Pawn Stars, or any of the storage unit shows, or pretty much that entire, stanky corner of cable tv programming. If it was more honest and real and straight-up, like Antiques Roadshow, then those segments of the show could be really interesting, but the pre-meditated nature of the "bartering" that they show us is repetitive, fake, bullshitty anathema to me.

* I'm sure i'm not the only person who's noticed that, other than that one Walking Dead episode (which amounted to shameless crosspromotion on AMCs part) and the Kevin Eastman episode, this show is all DC and Marvel, all the time. And that's really fucking boring, and seems to be totally missing the pulse of what's been happening in comics in this modern era. It's all about stuff that they read when they were kids, or teens, or twenty-somethings, and comes across as very middle-age-dudes who don't keep up with what's current at all, which is really strange considering they sit back there reading comics most of the day. I came back to comics because of Saga, and East of West, and Rat Queens, and that sort of stuff; that's what brought me back (Saga, specifically, is the monthly book that almost single-handedly brought me back). This show is all Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Green Lantern, Daredevil, (and other oddly-assorted pop culture/toy properties like He-Man, GI Joe, Godzilla, and the old Universal movie monsters); and not even the newer or more relevant stuff from those same-ol' same-ol' characters, which seems crazy to me. No mention of Doc-Ock as Spidey, but oh let's chat about a Spiderman Mego from 40 years ago and who stuck it up their ass in the bathtub when they were a kid. No discussion of how Clark has changed in the New 52, or even a mention of All Star Superman (which has to be the biggest work about that character of the last decade), but let's have an episode in which Dean Cain stops by to be super-awkward for 20 minutes? Or, hey, let's all hear for the 1000th time how important you think Dark Knight Returns is, Walt; that's the fresh hotness.  It's so bizarre, and seems horrifically out of touch. It's tough for me to stay engaged with the show when their focus and what they chat about is consistently so 1995. Give me just one episode, ONE, where they talk about the Image revolution, or bring up Saga, or Invincible, or Fables, or Locke & Key, or whathaveyou, and maybe I could come back to the show a bit.

* As alluded to in the OP, the way women customers and women characters are treated in this show is in-line with the rest of the chatter; it never fails to come across as really outdated and painful, to me. Women customers are always viewed though a "do you know what you're talking about, and why are you here in a comic shop where you don't belong" lens, and women characters (when they're discussed at all), are always shoved into a "who's sexier/who would you rather plow" framework. It's fucking awful.  Even when they had Nichelle Nichols on, they STILL managed to make it seem weird and disrespectful and sexist, and I came out of watching that episode feeling like I needed a shower and a shot of bourbon, not necessarily in that order.  Traveshamockery.
 
I guess, bottom line, for me this show went from being fun to being a too-short, too-repetitive, too one-note, too-gimmicky, too-scripted, too-homogenized middle-aged-dudes-stuck-in-the-past, sexist, sad mess that's not even about comics most of the time. How many times can a person watch Walt go through the same fucking barter, which is more or less planned out ahead of time anyways!?  "For this?  Ehhhhh, ahhhhhh, I dunnooooo, I don't think I could go any higher than $120."  "120?  I don't knowwwww.  I feel like i'd be cheating myself if I let this go for anything less thannnn" OH FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHY ARE YOU WASTING YOUR 20 MINUTES OF RUNTIME ON THIS GARBAGE. MOVE IT. ALONG. PLEASE.  And that's a shame and a half; I wish it weren't so. I wish it still had the life and the room to stretch their legs that they seemed to have in the first season, though to be honest, even if given back the longer run-time I have serious doubts as to whether the producers/writers of this show would know what to do with it anyways, since they clearly seem more interested in a clone of Pawn Stars than they are in a show about comics and comic-readers. Ah well.

I like the show, it's fun. Sometimes people look for problems, when they should just be laughing.