If you love watching real cops take down real bad guys, have I got a reality show for you.
“Bordertown: Laredo,” premiering tomorrow night on A&E is an old-fashioned show on the order of “Cops,” although this one focuses solely on the bordertown of Laredo, Texas, and on its overburdened cops in the narcotics division.
Laredo, in case you don’t know, is the Texas town that is separated from Mexico by only the Rio Grande.
And because of its location, it’s ground zero for the Mexican drug cartels. It’s the town where millions of dollars and millions of pounds of marijuana and cocaine slip between the two countries.
We’re not talking Larry your neighbor the pot dealer, we’re talking drug lords with fully-loaded vicious gangs ready to do their dirty work. In Laredo, that dirty work has recently added up to two dozen killings.
This series follows the men of the narcotics unit as they track and trap drug mules, dealers and worker bees who transport everything from thousands of pounds of drugs in tractor trailers to millions of dollars in their vehicles.
Many in this town even use their own homes as storage facilities.
The officers highlighted all work in civilian clothes, although they are not necessarily undercover — especially now that they’ve got their faces fully exposed on international TV.
We ride along with them on massive busts and smaller takedowns. We watch them overcome exhaustion as they work 29 hours straight, live with them as they go into dangerous situations and celebrate with them when they find the goods.
The goods can be anything from 2,700 pounds of pot to a car transmission with a secret compartment holding $100,000 in cash, to uncovered stashes of guns and rifles.
As one officer says, “We have a terrorist problem right across the border. The cartels are terrorists!”
And he’s right, of course. All that stands between us and them is the overworked, seemingly understaffed Laredo narcotics unit. How is that possible?
The real problem with the show, however, is that even with all this, the series somehow still lacks tension as the narcs go from one bust to the next interrogating perps who all say the same thing: “I don’t know anything.”
After a few episodes, you won’t be able to say the same thing. You’ll know a heckuva lot, but that may not be enough to keep you coming back for more.