IF “Trading Spaces,” married “Antiques Roadshow,” their baby would definitely come out looking like PBS’s newest outing, “History Detectives.” It’s got elements of both shows with a history lesson thrown in for good measure. Too bad it’s not as much fun, as zippy, or as interesting as either one of them.
Anyway, this weekly show, premiering tonight, has a regular ensemble company of four “detectives” (professors, art historians, appraisers), who take objects, places, and artifacts found by viewers and regular people and then flesh out and sometimes flush out the background behind each “find.”
The crew consists of Wes Cowan, an auctioneer and appraiser, Gwen Wright, an architecture professor, Tukufu Zuberi, a sociology prof, and Elyse Luray, an appraiser and art historian.
On the premiere, the crew looks into three “mysteries.” One is the origin of a tiny ceramic face found by a woman on the beach in Mantoloking, N.J. The second is what Ulysses S. Grant’s signature is doing in a firehouse guest book in Morristown, N.J.; and the third is the background of the Pop Lloyd baseball stadium in Atlantic City.
Each “mystery” is uncovered, layer by layer, by the “detectives” until a final conclusion is reached. So far so good.
Where the show falls short (or maybe apart) is that they have the “detectives” do their own voice-overs, and they usually end up sounding as bad as home-made commercials for storm windows.
And instead of letting the experts exist on their own merits, they insist on cheesing them up with embarrassing shots of them walking four abreast in the street like a bad promo for a local news team. To make it worse, they keep playing old rock music in the background whenever anything happens. It must be some sort of misguided attempt to grab the “youth market.”
Trust me – no one in the youth market is going to run to the TV because you play “Glory Days” while an old guy rides an antique fire engine.
On the upside, the quests and the outcomes are very interesting (the tedious U.S. Grant episode notwithstanding).
What’s missing is that they generally don’t reveal the value of stuff like they do on “Antiques Roadshow.” Of course, they can’t because how do you price a stadium that doesn’t even belong to you?
But I sure would like to know the value of other stuff. It’s kind of like a blind gossip item. You get the juice but not the big payoff. Will I watch it again? Yes. Will I still complain about the voiceovers? Yes.
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“History Detectives” (* * 1/2]
Tonight at 8 p.m. on Ch. 13