My wife and I used to be casual viewers of Storage Wars, but drifted away around the time Dave Hester left the show and pulled back the curtains in his dispute with the producers. When I heard he was returning to the show, I watched an episode or two out of morbid curiosity, and it was worse than I expected.
For one thing, they had completely stopped even pretending any of it was real. People would pull this brand new-looking equipment out of their lockers that had both the make and model clearly printed on it and say, "Wow, I wonder what this is? We need to go find an expert who can tell us something about it." As if they didn't have phones in their pockets which could have answered the question in less time than it took to ask it.
And then they drew up this weird narrative around Dave returning to the show purely to troll the auctioneers and other cast members.
I've heard people say, "Who cares if it's real, we watch because we like the characters." But I disagree. If A&E had advertised Storage Wars as a 100% scripted, staged show where the cast members were 'actors' rather than people who bid on storage lockers as part of their day-to-day lives, no one would have watched. No one.
