Does anyone remember South Beach Tow? It was one of the many reality TV shows that aired between 2011 and 2014. It was about a tow company located in Miami, Florida, in the South Beach area obviously, and it was for the most part comedy gold since despite the serious nature of the job it featured a good number of incidents in which the drivers found themselves dealing with some of the worst and most entitled individuals on the face of the earth. In a way this is one of those shows that might actually make the uninitiated viewers think that the people in Miami are some of the worst, most spoiled and entitled individuals this side of the 1 percent line. Seriously, each episode was filled with at least a couple of individuals that seemed ready to do pretty much anything that might help them to avoid getting their car towed since the standard fee seemed to be well over $100 just to get it off the tow truck and over $200 if the individual had to go and retrieve their car from the yard. On top of this is the idea that things were so loose around Tremont towing that it was a nuthouse half the time and only really functional a quarter of the time, at best.
If you had any doubts that reality TV is scripted and faked then Andy Dehnart of Reality Blurred should be able to put the kibosh on those doubts since it’s a little too obvious in some cases that the show was a dramatization of a job that can be kind of dull and even boring at times, but can heat up when people realize that their cars are about to be legally towed. There are so many instances in the show that make it obvious that it’s fake and scripted that it’s a wonder why anyone would bother saying otherwise. The dialogue is cheesy in a lot of ways, the action is at times bordering on illegal and at others goes fully illegal, enough to the point that anyone caught on camera would be in serious trouble the moment they were able to recognized. It’s not just the people whose cars are getting towed that would be in trouble either, it would be the drivers as well since some of the things they do are downright illegal no matter if they want to claim self-defense. One of the most notorious among them is also the most aggressive, and that’s one of the favorites of the show, Bernice.
If there’s any reason why the show should come back, it’s her. She was without a doubt the most entertaining driver that the show had and unlike a few of the others she didn’t back down that often and wasn’t about to take any guff from anyone when she was taking their car. Had it not been a potential disaster for the show she might have been allowed to manhandle more people than she did since throughout the course of the show she did manage to get her hands on a few people. Unfortunately there are instances in which good ol’ Bernice would be collared for assault and overly aggressive behavior no matter what defense she could think up since the show kind of went fringe a couple of times with the plot. Needless to say though, a few of the drivers rubbed the fans the wrong way, like Perez, who was a down and out snake to a lot of the people he worked with and was out for himself more often than not. Robbie, one of the kids of the Tremont owner, went off on his own after a while and even partnered with Perez, who is quite simply the person that people loved to hate.
The show was taken off the air when Tru TV changed to The New Tru TV and decided that they wanted their shows to be less vulgar and combative. This was kind of a shame really since despite the more cringe-worthy aspects of the show it was actually pretty entertaining. There were a few elements that could have been done without, but by season 4 it seemed as though it was just hitting its stride and could have gone on for a few more seasons before folding up. The wealth of characters were still there, the ideas were still fresh enough to make it work, and things were changing enough around Tremont that it could have continued forward for a while to come. But as the PC culture has been wearing on and on TV has been seen to adapt and evolve in ways that aren’t as accepting of the temper-laden shows such as South Beach Tow that were fueled by such behavior. It’s too bad really, this was one of the more enjoyable shows on TV despite being fake. Maybe one of these days the PC culture will loosen up a bit.
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