The Best Television Show You’re Also Not Watching, or My Father’s Love of Discount Stores is Hereditary

Warning: there is a little bit of an adult reference in the middle of this post. It’s pretty tame when compared to most out there these days, but I wanted to warn you all ahead of time in the event you’re the Duggar Family or something.

We all know I have a very weird taste in television programming.  Last September, I devoted an entire blog post to my favorite TV show of the moment, Connect with English.  Yes, ESL instructional programming.  But it involved Mark Consuelos (aka Kelly Ripa’s husband)! How could I not watch?

Well, dear readers, I’ll open up another page of my personal TV Guide and introduce you to another television show that you should be watching, because it brings me great joy:

Dollar Bill’s Discount World.

Every Saturday morning, at 8am, I drag myself out of bed – despite my pure inability to stand the mornings – to watch this show on MyTV New England.  It’s a program that consists of a man in his early fifties or so – Dollar Bill – literally racing through his giant warehouse of a bargain discount warehouse store in Derry, New Hampshire, telling his viewers all of the amazing deals he has that weekend. He wears a primary-colored umbrella hat with dollar bills strung from it’s ends, which dance around his head by the gale force of power he creates by running and jumping around his store, which appears to be roughly the size of a hockey arena.

Dollar Bill makes voices, gets out of breath and screams and yells.  He throws his products to the ground, usually for no apparent reason.  This morning, for instance, he through plastic plates on the ground to show that they don’t break, “unless you throw them really hard.”  He caresses teddy bears and stuffed animals on sale in an almost uncomfortable way.  During Valentine’s Day, he tried to convince the men of New England for three straight weeks that their significant others wanted a crystal rose in a satin box, which he had on sale for $3.99.  At Halloween time, he demonstrates every single Halloween decoration he has on sale, including Friday the 13th masks, goo, steaming punch bowls, and so on.  He oohs and fawns over picture frames and,the meat and potatoes of any dollar store, ceramic figurines of any animal or person known to man.  “Look at these.  These would be $20 in a regular store. They’d be great on a shelf in a living room or a bedroom, or a knick-knack stand.  Look at the detailing and the painting,” Dollar Bill explains breathlessly, like he’s a cheap phone sex operator. “Ooh, ooh, OOOOOHHHHH! They’re so pretty!!!” he then shrieks like said phone sex operator faking something for a client.

Dollar Bill occasionally has special deals, like his annual auction (from everything I’ve heard, he’s a legit auctioneer) and his “Deals of the Day” (like a pack of 4 light bulbs for a quarter.) Recently, he was taking the last five minutes of every show to shill a friend from New Jersey’s daughter’s 2003 Black Honda Civic, which he claimed he was selling to raise money to send his own daughter to college.  (I don’t know if I’d be mortified to be Dollar Bill’s daughter, or if I’d think it was awesome. I think personally I’d reach some sort of happy medium between mortification and awesomeness.)  It took him a few weeks to sell, but I think he eventually did sell the car, because it hasn’t been featured as of late.

And at the very end of every show, the camera gets a close up of Dollar Bill, who will then leave his viewers with some affirming or encouraging statement to tell us that despite the tough economic times, we are all going to be okay, especially if we do our shopping at his store. This morning he said something along the lines of, “Getting through tough times only makes us tougher, so we’ll make it through this, and you can still have everything you need if you shop here.”

I feel so much better about our current Great Depression now.  Thank you, Dollar Bill.

To watch an episode of Dollar Bill’s Discount World, click here, or tune into MyTV New England (Channel 18 on my Comcast down in Boston) Saturday mornings at 8am.