Dream Derby: Week 1
“American Dream Derby,” airing on the Game Show Network, premiered on January 10 and features 12 contestants vying for a prize of $250,000 and a stable of eight Thoroughbreds. Each week, one contestant is eliminated following a match race. The final episode will air live on February 21.
Episode 1: In which introductions are made.
The show opens with shots of the contestants wandering around Santa Anita Park intercut with interview clips. Here’s a determined-looking woman named Susan telling the camera, “There’s nothing I care more about than horseracing,” and a young man named LaVar looking dazed to be at a racetrack. “I’m from the hood,” he says. There may be no horses in the hood, but there are lots of horses in Delaware, where another contender named David grew up learning about racing from his handicapper/horse owner father. David is cocky — he’s not the only one to say he’s confident, but he is the only to say, “I feel I’m going to win.” I have a feeling he’s not long for this game.
The contestants — Susan, LaVar, David, Tara C., Tara W., Dean, Chris, Eric, Deanna, Sara, Aaron, and Jewel — are called to the winner’s circle, where they’re welcomed to the track and given their first challenge by the show’s host, a former model named Steve Santagati, who puts on a serious face to tell us that Santa Anita is a historic track, once the home of Seabiscuit. (I wondered how long it would take for a ‘Biscuit reference to crop up. About 90 seconds.) Their first task is to wager $1000 on the day’s third race. Grabbing copies of the Daily Racing Form, the 12 make their picks, dash to the windows to place their bets, and then head out to the rail to watch the race. There’s no evidence of betting strategy on the part of the players — each makes multiple wagers, and several of them bet one horse to win and two or three to show. What are they thinking? Probably not much, given that we learned in the beginning that at least half have never gone to a race, much less bet on one, before. “What’s a handicapper?,” Sara asks.
The four horse wins, and Jewel, one of the players who has never visited a track, jumps up and down, yelling, “I picked that horse, but I don’t know what I won. Someone better tell me something.” Jewel’s wager is far from being enough to win the challenge, which is won by Susan, who turned her $1000 into $1240, beating David by a mere three dollars. Overall, the group does terribly, turning $12,000 into $8700.
The prize for winning the challenge is that Susan is now an “owner,” which means that she gets to spend the night in a mansion and can pick three other players to come with her. The remaining eight are “stablehands,” and must sleep in the barn. A limo whisks Susan, David, Tara W., and Aaron off to the owner’s house, as the rest head to the backstretch to inspect their accommodations: sleeping bags on cots in stalls. The players are surprised, and some a little dismayed. Sara complains that the barn is cold, LaVar calls the horses “funky.” Over at the mansion, the owners are oohing over the king-sized beds and aahing over the luxurious bathrooms. It’s good to be a winner in this game.
The next day, the stablehands are rousted from their cots at dawn by trainer Alex Hassinger and turned out to watch the morning works. Finally, we get to see some extended horse shots and meet the 15 horses — Regal Cruiser, Sharp as a Fox, Archie’s Dream, Free to Please, Ready to Flirt, Avenueofknowledge, Kool Smoke, Triumphal Entry, NuKidd, Nigel No Mates, Shoot Yeah, Crafty Value, Big Wagner, R Champ and Lauren’s Halo — in the show’s barn. For a reality show about racing, we’ve seen dismayingly little of racing or the animals up to this point, and we don’t see that much of them now. The horses flash by, with Hassinger saying little more than their names and ages. Even an experienced horseplayer would struggle to keep them straight, never mind the novices in the group.
Out of these horses, the players will pick the two that’ll run in the match race at the end of each episode. The contestant that chooses the winning horse stays and gets $5000; the one who picked the losing horse leaves immediately. Before we get to the episode’s match race, though, we must watch the first stablehand challenge, and it’s one that would fit right in on “Fear Factor”: The stablehands are given five minutes to dig through a pile of manure and find a key that’ll unlock a wheelbarrow, which they must then load up, using their bare hands, with as much manure as they can, dumping the waste in big plastic bins for weighing. Most of the stablehands team up for the task, but only two teams find their key. LaVar, helped out by Chris, wins, the two having managed to muck more than 250lbs in the allotted time.
LaVar and Susan are the first two winners on the show, and to them falls the responsibility of either picking a horse to run in the match race, or choosing another contestant to pick a horse. Both pass the buck, LaVar to Deanna, a third-generation racing fan, and Susan to David, because “He’s my biggest competitor.” Deanna, who seems somewhat knowledgeable about handicapping, picks Crafty Value; David chooses Avenueofknowledge. Each player is allowed to place a bet on one of the horses at even odds, and then the horses are brought out to the starting gate. The bell goes off, and Avenueofknowledge stumbles badly coming out. He regains his feet and pulls close to Crafty Value, who wins the two-furlong race by just a head. David is out. Ah, tough break. If Avenueofknowledge hadn’t stumbled, would he have won? It’s the kind of question horseplayers torment themselves with after every loss. Just as in rest of racing, in “Dream Derby” the fate of the players all comes down to the horses.
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Episode 2: In which Dean reveals a wily streak and we finally see some Hispanic backstretch workers.
Back in the barn, David is as forgotten by the stablehands as he has been by the viewers. All the talk is of Dean’s so-called betrayal: He bet on the owners’ horse, not the stablehands’ pick, and his disloyalty is the subject of much outrage. “Dean messed up by not going with Deanna,” sputters Jewel. “If we could vote him out — he would be out!” There seems to be a misperception among the players that they’re on teams and must band together. Do these people not understand the game? Who’s a stablehand and who’s an owner is going to change very, very soon.
The next morning, the contestants are brought out to the track and made to run half a furlong. Each completes the task, and Steve asks the winner, Chris, if he’d like to be an owner. “I’m ready,” he says. Foolish fellow. Watching over this little scene is a man we’re now introduced to as John, professional handicapper — that is, the guy who assigns weights. All but two of the players are loaded up with weights that range from 30 to 120lbs and then brought out to the starting gate. Off goes the bell and the runners break into one of the funniest reality show challenges ever filmed. We gets shots of the players straggling across the track, awkwardly juggling their weights as they dash to the finish line. The race is close, but Dean — the oldest player in the bunch — wins with a come from behind push in the final yards.
It’s Dean’s turn to pick three owners, and he chooses Jewel, LaVar, and Chris. They retreat to the mansion. The stablehands return to the barn, none appearing more disappointed at this turn of events than Aaron, who enters the shedrow with a noticeable look of skepticism. He’s identified as a “horse groomer” under his name sometimes, but he doesn’t appear to like horses all that much, standing several feet away from the stalls and tentatively reaching out a finger to touch one horse’s nose.
Trainer Alex Hassinger arrives on the scene again, this time to give the stablehands a lesson in horse identification. In a scene that barely lasts a minute, the horses are brought out and their marks noted: Here’s one with two white hind feet and a blaze, and here’s one with a star, and here’s another with a white rear right foot. It’s too fast! It’s too short! I want to see more of the horses. But what we’re going to see instead is another stablehand challenge.
In this one, the stablehands must dunk their heads into a tub filled with molasses and oats and, using only their mouths, pick out plaques with a horse’s name on it, and then run to where three horses are standing and put the correct name on a post in front of the right horse, all in less than a minute. Actually, the task was a little more complicated than that — there was something about having to do it in the fastest time set by … oh, never mind. It wasn’t that interesting.
What is interesting is that we finally see some Hispanic backstretch workers holding the horses as the stablehands pursue their silly task. Up to this point, in every scene set in the barn, I’d been marveling at how clean the stable looked, and how sunny, and how completely bereft it was of any sign of even one Hispanic hotwalker or groom, which, if true, would make it unlike at least 90% of the other barns on the Santa Anita backside.
The challenge ends, Aaron is declared the winner, and the horses and their handlers disappear once more. At the stable and the mansion, the players pore over their Daily Racing Forms, looking for the right horse to run in the next match race. In the stable, there’s the added intrigue of trying to determine who Aaron might choose to pick a horse. Whisper, whisper, whisper, go the stablehands.
The big moment arrives and the players gather once more for the match race that’ll decide that night’s loser. Dean chooses Jewel to pick the owners’ horse, and Aaron names Deanna. “I’ve manipulated the situation,” he crows in an interview clip. But he wasn’t as clever as Dean. The horse we’d seen everyone agreeing is the best in earlier shots is Kool Smoke, who isn’t among the three horses Dean “suggested” to Jewel as worthy picks. Jewel is given first choice, and she has a chance to ask Hassinger one question about one horse. “I don’t have a question,” she blurts, as she wildly stares at the portraits of the horses in the barn that are hanging on the back wall of the room they’re in. She chooses Shoot Yeah. Deanna, of course, picks Kool Smoke.
The players move to the track and the horses are brought out. The players makes their bets, and Dean, for the second time, bets on the other horse. Jewel looks stricken. Kool Smoke wins decisively, and Deanna is now up $11,000. Aaron is most unhappy about the situation. “She’s one lucky bitch,” he tells the camera.
