YUUUP! Storage Wars is Fake!

Dave Hester — of silly Storage Wars YUUUP! infamy — is of one of those odd, and sadly self-serious, folk who happen to wind up on “reality” television and are then routinely surprised when people like us, who have never met them in person before, yet still know precisely who they are just by watching how poorly they treat others on television.  This phenomenon is uncommonly known as “The Kardashian Effect” or, less routinely, perhaps, as “The Mark of Dave Hester.”

Hester is now suing the show that made him a television evildoer:

After being locked out of filming the new season of A&E’s Storage Wars, star Dave Hester is suing the network and Original Productions for wrongful termination and breach of contract, among other things, claiming the show is fake and he was fired for pointing that out. …

The lawsuit claims that “nearly every aspect of the Series is faked,” including “going so far as to stage entire storage units” and claiming producers are “paying for storage units on behalf of the weaker cast members who lack the [sic] both the skill and financial wherewithal to place winning bids.” It says that during season one of Storage Wars, producers “requested that Hester provide valuable items that would be planted” in lockers he bought, and while he “initially agreed to do so,” he later complained and was no longer asked to do that, though producers continued to salt the lockers of other cast members during season two.

I realize Hester thinks he’s making news by revealing these sorts of reality shows are not really based in any sort of actual reality — and they cannot be — because being on a set takes time and money and you can’t risk not revealing something dramatic.

Storage Wars without the blooper lockers and the “hidden” prizes is “Let’s Make a Deal” without finding out what’s behind door number two:

Storage Wars executive producer Thom Beers admitted writing cast members’ lines and staging storage lockers on the show, but only by “occasionally” moving items from one locker to another. A lawsuit filed this week by one of the show’s stars, Dave Hester, accuses the show of being a “fraud” and “faked.”

Salting reality shows is an entertainment chestnut as old as the carnival barker selling you a fifty cent ticket to see the rubber lady evading blunt knives in in a makeshift coffin.  We like to be tricked.  We prefer to suspend reality for the sake of being entertained each evening just so we can hide from the humdrum mediocrity of our everyday lives.

What people like Dave Hester don’t quite understand is that when you become a fink and you try to rat out the very show that made you famous and rich — the world tends to instantly turn against you as a turncoat, a human carpetbagger, and an ungrateful impostor in an ever-cheapening, and poor, world — and we all look in awe and diswonderment at the Dave Hesters of this world and together we all wonder why he feels so wronged for being given to much unearned success on a show that never really needed him in the first place.