We're not going to just describe an episode of Pinks here. Promise.
Speedworld Raceway Park is stuck in the middle of the Arizona desert about 30 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix. It's not glamorous. It's not beautiful. And in the summer, it's brutally hot. But it has a dragstrip, and in January the weather is pretty nice.
So Speed Channel's successful Pinks picked Speedworld as a venue for taping its second season of winner-takes-both-cars match races. The Speed Channel isn't on every cable system in the country and isn't packaged with every satellite dish, so there's a chance you've never seen Pinks. But the premise of the show is so simple - and at the very heart of hot rodding and drag racing - that even if you haven't seen it, the appeal is undeniable. Pinks recreates an age-old street race between two people who each think their vehicle is quick enough to win and who are confident enough to wager the pink slip, i.e., the car's title, on the outcome. It's been going on since the '50s, and now it's on TV.
To heighten the tension and draw out the drama, it's done in a three-out-of-five race format with everything negotiable between rounds. The races are often interesting in and of themselves, but it's the jockeying for advantage during the negotiations - giving up lengths on the start, how many stages of nitrous sniffing to allow, or anything else that can be tweaked - that is at the heart of the show. It's a battle of wits, perceptions, and deceptions. And then it's a race. In short, it's high-stakes street racing turned into a game show.
Pinks is the latest manifestation of TV's current obsession with automotive-based programming. As the number of cable networks has grown, the need for fresh shows has increased...and keeps increasing. And to be economically viable, all those shows need to be cheap. A lot of people like cars, a lot of people are doing interesting things with cars, and it doesn't cost a lot to put some cameras on those people. What could be cheaper than a game show where the contestants supply their own prizes?
Pinks shoots multiple episodes in a single day, and there were three scheduled for Friday, Jan. 13, starting with a mismatch between an '86 Ford Mustang and a '92 Honda Civic, followed by a battle between pickups, and finally a monster nighttime showdown between small-block-powered Chevys - a '70 Camaro from Texas and a '68 Nova from Connecticut.
Walk onto a movie set and the effort behind the illusion is immediately apparent; virtually everything is artificial. But the Pinks set was simply the Speedworld quarter-mile covered with enough VHT to pull your toes off if you walked barefoot on it and a big Pinks logo painted just forward of the staging areas. Sure there were video cameras all over the place, but that's true at any NHRA National event, too. Hollywood seemed 6,000 miles away instead of just 380.
"Everyone's wondering if it's fake or [if] I'm a tool," says host, co-creator, and co-producer Rich Christensen. "But this is real. They all say they're going to build a piece of [crap], and they don't care if they lose it. But by the end, they wind up loving their vehicles. And all of a sudden they're on camera, and I need a decision from them whether to accept the next race in the next five seconds. It's a pressure cooker that takes them out of their comfort zone. It's a whole new experience for these guys. A pressure cooker of this extreme human drama."
TV producers are a high-intensity breed, but intense is too puny a word to describe the 42-year-old Christensen. When he talks, he seems to be looking into and through your eyes as if he's watching a DVD being projected on the inside back wall of your skull. His lifetime of weight lifting, wind sprints, and a bland diet heavy on whey protein has resulted in defined muscles and so little body fat you see the steroid-free blood moving through his veins. He talks in short, declarative sentences enunciated with deliberate clarity. And he shaves his head. He knows nothing about cars.
"I watch eight to 10 hours of [TV] a day," Christensen says. "I don't know anything about movies. Music? I'm clueless. My life is three things: family, fitness, and television."
A native of Hampton, Iowa, Christensen graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a degree in radio and television and then headed to New York for an internship on the soap opera Another World. A couple of months later, he came back to Iowa, packed up his Buick Electra and headed to Los Angeles. While working in gyms and with production companies, he kept pitching series ideas to the various networks. A scant 15 years of trying later, he made his first series sale: Pinks. "I can barely open my hood," he asserts. "My first time on a dragstrip was season one. I'd never heard of nitrous."
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