There’s a suitcase with $100,000 in it. The fake robbers have an hour to hide it, and the real cops have 48 hours to find it. If the cops don’t find it, the “robbers” get to keep it.
So, who are you going to root for — a couple of hard-working veteran cops who have kids to put through college, or two hard-working Hispanics dealing with a parent who is fighting cancer?
Cancer parent versus kids to put through school. Yeah! That’s the hilarious premise of “Take the Money and Run,” ABC’s newest reality competition show from the folks who brought you both “The Amazing Race” and the many different “CSI’s.”
Each show begins when the two regular Joes (a k a “the robbers”) meet with a mysterious stranger (Zen Gesner) who seems to be channeling Clint Eastwood. He handcuffs one “robber” to the money-filled briefcase and hands the key to the briefcase to the other.
Clearly restraining himself from blurting out, “Go ahead, make my day!” Gesner instead growls that they need to find a great hiding place for the briefcase before they are picked up by the real cops. The cops will be given their GPS coordinates, all receipts and cellphone records.
Still, it never occurs to anyone that the handcuffed person should just take the key while the other drives around aimlessly confusing the cops.
After an hour, the two real cops “arrest” them at a specified location and put them in jail. On tonight’s episode, the lock-up looks straight out of Dickens with miniscule windowless cells, a bare bulb and no toilet.
While the cops are searching for the dough, the prisoners must submit to interrogation by two professional interrogators, Mary Hanlon Stone and Paul Bishop, who just happen to also be authors and horrible over-actors. They are there to break the prisoners into giving up the hiding place.
They pepper them with tough questions like, “This isn’t your kinda thing is it?” Not for nuthin’ but whose kinda thing is a windowless, black cell? The Marquis de Sade?
At one point, the voiceover announces, “Raoul is getting more arrogant and treating the interrogation like a game!”
Apparently Raoul is the only one who understands that this is a game. Keep the money and run like hell if you’re tired of reality shows that border on surreality.