Jockeys!

Oy.

The particular soap opera slant of the Animal Planet's new reality show "Jockeys" makes me cringe.  There's soap opera in horse racing, but Jockeys doesn't just churn up a lather around the personalities inside horse racing for enhanced dramatic effect; it's often illogical about the way the business functions.  

The examination of the rise of a young jockey vis a vis the struggle of the veterans to hang onto their position is a legitimate enterprise. However, Jockeys implies that all of Joe Talamo's wins are a personal defeat for Aaron Gryder, same as the Steelers killing the Cardinals. Not to mention, I watch this thing and think "Aaron Gryder? Aaron Gryder?" That's random. I guess Jockeys needed to assign its pre-determined roles to the jockeys willing to participate, and some of the casting is strained.

The show makes very little of what drives this game - BETTING. Jockeys has dubbed in fake race calls by Trevor Denman so that Denman's calls now focus on the personalities aboard the horse instead of where the horses are in the race. I had to re-watch the Lady's Secret Stakes won by Zenyatta after listening to Denman's ludicrous call for this event on Jockeys. Thankfully the real call understood there's not a lot of suspense in a closely grouped field of four with every horse positioned as expected.

This isn't football - horse racing doesn't have time to amp up the melodrama among non-contenders while the race is on. That's what the pre-race show is for, and the sports pages the next day -- if any care, and outside the Triple Crown and the Breeders Cup, few do. No race caller can repeatedly call attention to a horse that's gone down and still do his job, which is calling the race. Barbaro's breakdown in the Preakness got less attention from Tom Durkin during the run of that race than Denman's phony announcement about Nakatani's horse taking a tumble on Jockeys. "Nakatani and his horse are down! Nakatani and his horse are down!" Meantime I guess the rest of the field was surging towards the quarter pole unremarked.

For me, Jockeys' other featured storyline, the romance between Mike Smith and Chantal Sutherland, is a bit unsettling, partly because of the age difference, mostly because I thought Mike Smith was already married. (I've since learned he's divorced.) Still, he just looks and carries himself like a guy with a good-natured wife his own age and four kids.

Chantal has an intense personality that reveals itself when she's rooting Mike on, but she mumbles her way through the contrived him-and-her scenarios and the stubborn girly girlfriend role she's been coached to enact for their personal life. We're meant to believe that the half-unpacked, modest contents of Chantal Sutherland's duffel bag that we see scattered about an unfurnished room of the condo consumes every closet in the dwelling so that poor Mike Smith doesn't even have a place to store a slender pair of workout pants of his own. Women!