Critic Reviews

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.).

Lock ’n Load treats Wayne and many fellow customers as curiosities, and occasionally smacks of condescension. (The “Amazing Grace’’ sequence, in particular, crosses a line.) But the series also takes pains to avoid making judgments, and offers a parade of gun owners so vast that we end up with a broad view.

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.

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.

For whatever reason, it’s hard for me to treat Lock ’n Load as mere entertainment. But maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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.

Ultimately, though, the stories here are too brief and, frankly, too ordinary to sustain the viewer's interest for very long.

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.