Lock N' Load

NRA enthusiasts might be the target audience for this reality show about a Colorado gun shop, but Lock manages to have mainstream appeal, thanks to its focus on the store's quirky customers (a shank-holding old lady, a gun-loving pastor, etc.).

Watching Logan hand small children assault rifles for inspection will no doubt amuse gun nuts and enrage anti-gun nuts. And both camps are likely to blink at one of the (surprisingly numerous) female customers who--jokingly asked if she's carrying a weapon--whips out three concealed knives.

Though the seeming intent of Lock 'N Load is to glorify firearms--in one scene, a pastor takes target practice to the tune of "Amazing Grace"--it's sometimes tough to tell which consumers are motivated by valid concerns and which are unreasonable fruitcakes. Consequently, the show is something an ink-blot test.

Ryan prompts the patrons to talk, but the stories don't really develop into much; and although the arms-buying demographic is indeed wider than one who has not spent much time in a gun store might imagine, their reasons for buying tend to be variations on the same few themes: I was robbed; I don't want to be robbed; guns are fun to collect and shoot.

Given the edginess generally associated with pay TV's forays into reality--focusing on things like whorehouses and bail bondsmen--this is a surprisingly toothless affair, as if Showtime bought a concept, wound up with nothing to show for it and figured what the hell, let's take a shot, as it were, by airing the episodes.

We get some slightly bent soccer moms and dads debriefed by an impossibly cheery, cheesy, chummy game-show host. Showtime must have thought there would be great humor and irony in the mundane exchanges recorded here. But it miscalculated. Badly.

The truly terrible, Lock 'N Load, a six-parter debuting tonight on Showtime, is possibly the worst-taste reality series since "The Littlest Groom"--and it took some serious doing on the part of Showtime to manage that.