Most reality television watchers could likely recognize the cast of Pawn Stars on sight. However, while they’ve become plenty familiar with Rick, Chumlee, and the rest at this point, they may not know once juicy detail. The show, which was centered on the Las Vegas Pawn Shop, helped most of the crew members to get to know each other before they had their own shows.
When Pawn Stars first aired on July 26, 2009, it was actually years in the making. Founder of the shop at the center of things, Rick Harrison opened Gold & Silver Pawn Shop 20 years earlier.
‘Pawn Stars’ Started Thanks To PBS?
The shop, and the people who worked in it got their first real start when Gold & Silver Pawn Shop was the focus of a PBS documentary in 2001, eight years before its move to reality TV. The documentary made the shop flourish and Rick saw a chance to create a reality series.
In an interview back then, he spoke about how he recognized the potential of a standalone program. “For lack of a better term, I was always just a media whore, and whenever I got national press, it was good for business,” he told 8 News Now Las Vegas. But there was another television stop before the reality show.
The Next Step
Rick saw another opportunity in 2003 when the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop was featured on comedian Dave Attell’s show Insomniac. This is where Rick realized that his shop could be the center of reality TV.
The Pawn Stars figure really started pitching a reality TV show about the business, but it turned out that producers and networks weren’t on board just yet.
“I was pitching the show for four years, and nothing ever came of it,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2010.
Eventually, a network saw the promise, though it wasn’t really what Rick envisioned.
It turned out that HBO wanted to put the Pawn Stars crew on television, though with a very different twist. That network wanted to do a kind of Taxicab Confessions sort of show. But there was one problem. Nothing as sexy or crazy as Taxicab Confessions really happened with Rick’s pawn shop.
After what Rick has described as “a terrible pilot” the show never got off the ground.
Leftfield Pictures reached out to the owner of the Pawnshop after this failed attempt and shared his extensive historical knowledge with him. The company put the show where it belonged — on the History channel. That turned out to be the winning move for Pawn Stars.
“We never thought it was going to be this big,” Rick once said. “I was hoping to get a season or two out of it — may be a little press, maybe a little more business in the store, but I never thought it was going to do this.”
Teddy has been writing about entertainment and politics for literally hundreds of years. He may have this as a reason for his many opinions and expert knowledge on all things he writes.