Fifteen years ago, Jim and I were approached by two different TV producers to do a car guy TV show.
That experience summed up why car guy TV is on a crash and burn mission in 2025.
Jerry Sutherland
The first TV car guy show proposal was to put out a video version of MyStarCollectorCar. In other words, we’d contact car guys and talk to them on this show—a video version of a typical MyStar interview.
This sounded like a great idea because MyStar was in its infancy—plus they liked the identical twin angle. They asked Jim and me to line up some local car guys to set up some stories and get things moving ahead.
Then they decided to go in a different direction and completely abandoned the idea. But not before they talked to a few guys and left them hanging–after promising to call them back.
They never did call them back, so Jim and I became their meat shields to explain to the local guys why they were left behind like discarded beer cans. I phoned the TV guys about 100 times before they called back and finally gave an answer—they’d gone in a different direction by using a major restoration shop in Eastern Canada to get all their content.
That was the first time.
The second production company was from the States, and they were looking to start a car culture TV show with Jim and me involved as hosts.
I was more skeptical this time and far less enthusiastic, but I still did the video interview. They wanted Jim and me to rev up the enthusiasm like we were doing a WWE promotion. That’s not my—or Jim’s style…not even close. Everyone involved agreed it was a bad idea.
I could get pretty boisterous back in my night-crawling days after about twenty beers, but I had to draw the line at developing a severe drinking habit just to rev up for a TV show.
Those two experiences told me what was wrong with car guy TV. It was more about their distorted vision of car guys than a realistic view of the hobby. Car guys aren’t comedians or entertainers—they’re simply guys who know their way around a car.
The TV guys wanted Hollywood, but most car guys are blue collar, so when they put a plot together it didn’t have anything to do with old cars. It was all about fake conflicts, fake deadlines and brutally bad jokes.
Eventually these shows became unwatchable. They evolved in some ways, but they still had the same three plots in every episode. The demise of these shows was inevitable, because car guys want to learn stuff more than they want to be entertained, and fake fights get really old really fast.
YouTube was the death blow for conventional car guy TV. Suddenly you had real car guys solving real problems—and recording the whole process with their phones. Some of the more popular online car guys found projects in junkyards and drove them 2500 miles to get home.
That’s the kind of drama every car guy understands. We’ve all been on the side of the road with overheating radiators, no gas, no alternator, no brakes. That’s why we can relate to these videos—plus they don’t all have happy endings.
That’s also what TV car guy producers never understood.
Jerry Sutherland
By: Jerry Sutherland
Jerry Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer with a primary focus on the collector car hobby. His work has been published in many outlets and publications, including the National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Regina Leader-Post, Vancouver Sun and The Truth About Cars. He is also a regular contributor to Auto Roundup Publications.
- CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER
- CLICK HERE to Like us on Facebook
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Twitter
- CLICK HERE to Follow us on Pinterest
Please re-post this if you like this article.
