How Antiques Roadshow Stole My Heart by Crushing Dreams

Slightly embarrassing confession: I LOVE Antiques Roadshow. It's basically Sad Hoarders who bring in terrible garbage from their overstuffed attic desperately hoping their crappy family heirlooms are worth enough to pay their mortgage off. Don't tell me you haven't seen it, the show has been around for over 30 years and is in just about every country. In Finland it's called "Anna Lapsellesi Talonpoika Koira" which translates to "Give Me Your Baby Peasant Dog" (it sounds better in Finnish) and has a heavy metal soundtrack. If you've never seen Antiques Roadshow but have seen even a single episode of Jersey Shore, or a minute of any of the Fast and Furious movies, please reassess your life because you're not making good life decisions.  People mistake it for people an old person's show, a misconception because everyone on it is wearing adult diapers, but it's not, it gives you the chance to feel superior to your elders.

The show is a constant cycle of disappointment because every single person walks in there with something they've tied their self-worth to and arms themselves with the expectation that their crappy armoire is their ticket out of crapping in a pot in their backyard. But the expert appraisers are no better. They're socially awkward uber-nerds who have an inhuman knowledge about a very specific niche that has no worldly value outside of this show. They also give way too much detail when the person sitting there doesn't care about the history, they just want to know the value. 

Oh my! No I don't want to see your "hour hand". Just tell me how much it's worth.

Here's how most exchanges go:

Open on Sad Old Lady standing there with a chair she's had cluttering up the corner of her living room for the past 50 years. Chair Nerd is staring at it with a pensive look on his face, desperately waiting for Sad Old Lady to shut her yap about her personal history with the chair that no one has ever used for the purpose of sitting. 

She hurt her arm fapping to how much money she thinks she's going to get. Run lady, those creepy clones are going to steal your soul!

SAD OLD LADY: 
This chair was given to my by my mother who got it from her mother who got it from Genghis Khan after giving him a rusty trombone (okay, no one has ever said that, but this is MY short fantasy slash fiction version of Antiques Roadshow, and I'm allowed some artistic license). No one has sat in it except Genghis bare-back and that streak right there is from him. 

CHAIR NERD: 
Hmmm 
(a couple seconds of thoughtful contemplation as though he hadn't written and memorized a script) 
This is a very interesting piece I think you have to look at some of the defining characteristics of a piece such as this for instance there's a portion of the left leg here that has the initials of the carver and if you look at the cushion you can tell it has been reupholstered a time or two as the original cushion would have been made of the knuckle hair of Grecian children and been colored periwinkle where this is clearly made from platypus feathers which would only have been used in the 1920's when the first platypus was discovered in the Florida everglades and killed for being an abomination of nature and an afront to God and I have smelled the wood and the stench of it means it was made of beechwood which, not to break your hear, could not have been made by Genghis Khan as it obviously dates back to only the 19th century but that doesn't mean the 
(did I mention that the assessors talk in one drawn-out run-on sentence without taking a breath? They do.) 
chair isn't a fascinating piece it was in fact carved by a blind man toiling in a human factory run by famed Mason William Morgan before he was assassinated by the Masons for threatening to air some of their secrets and after his assassination, his factory was burned by angry masons including all the blind carvers working there so this chair is very rare and if it weren't for the reupholster job it could fetch over $10,000 at auction, however your grandma obviously got drunk and vomited on the chair leaving that streak and with the discoloration on the wood it could fetch around $1,500-$2,000 at auction.

SAD OLD LADY: 

(Through gritted teeth) 
Gee that's great. 
(What the sad old spinster heard was that she can get $10,000 and won't budge from that number assuring that dumb chairs stays in the corner of her studio apartment acting as a throne for her cats with bladder-control issues.)

End Scene.

What I love about the show is that they gather the weirdest freaks from around the world that you normally only see every once-in-awhile at a sporting event or Disneyland or in the news for accidentally lighting themselves on fire for passing out with a lit cigarette on a bed of dream-catchers. And that's both sides, the assessors and the people with the wildly diverse garbage. 

Aside form the occasional history lesson, there's hundreds of drinking games out there you can play too!

Some people might find it depressing because, well, aside from the fact that throughout an entire episode the collective amount of times anyone on that show has had sex barely cracks double digits, that for every find that's worth tens of thousands, there's a parade of people who have their dreams crushed. 

Oh yeah, these two are regular Wilt Chamberlains. 

It's because these people are clutching these objects that they treasure above their own children and have built an entire mythology around this object in their mind and this guy in the tweed jacket is going to validate their obsession with this bauble and make them rich enough to leave their job at the chicken slaughter house, or at least enough to afford their gout medication. But I kind of like creating the fake mythology around the people and their objects (as you can see). 

Also, there's a twisted joy I feel in watching people's misplaced materialistic dreams get crushed under the harsh boot heal of reality where they are forced to learn it was better to dream and believe the myth and labor under delusion. Hopefully they see the lesson that an object is really only worth what our feelings for it warrant. But they probably don't, and Starfeeshus GlowHeart will still show up in his homemade duck print hemp-sewn overalls with nothing underneath, asking how much he can get for his beloved crockpot that he swear was made from the pulverized bone of Sitting Bull. And I love him for it.