Oh my, folks, do I have a treat for you today! The folks out at A&E sent out a copy of Storage Wars Season One to review, and I couldn’t be happier. This is one of my personal favorite shows, and having it all in one package is a sheer delight.

Storage Wars Season One is the lead-off season for Storage Wars, a show with a variety of entertaining features. Basically, in Storage Wars, we’ll be going to a series of storage locker auctions. See, if you rent a storage locker, and then fail to pay the rent for a certain length of time, the locker–and its contents–go up for auction to pay the delinquent rent. And here, we follow a group of four (actually five) folks who make a living on auction buying: Darrell Sheets, an inveterate gambler in search of the elusive “wow factor”; Barry Weiss, a seemingly wealthy and clearly eccentric (he once brought two psychics to an auction to give himself an edge) collector of unusual items; Jarrod Schulz and his wife and partner Brandi, who own a small resale shop; and Dave Hester, the abrasive, hard-charging owner of a big resale shop. These four factions will find themselves in constant competition, and then, once individual winners emerge, we get to find out just what they bought, and how much it’s worth.

See what I mean? Not only do you get the fun of the various factions intermingling–for instance, Dave is constantly at odds with Darrell, and that leaves them in frequent bidding wars, while Jarrod and Brandi are desperate to make their resale shop a thriving concern–but you also get the thrill of discovery on several levels. You get to find out what’s in the lockers, and then, what’s in the items in the lockers, in terms of value. Sometimes even literally, with those lockers that have trunks or cabinets or dressers or Jarrod’s personal favorite, lockboxes.

And this is why I’m convinced that this show is awesome. Yes, there’s an element of repetition here–you’re always at a storage auction, you always find stuff, it gets inevitably appraised–but there’s a lot of originality. Every item is different, every finder is different. There’s no way to know if Jarrod and Brandi will find something amazing one day, or if Dave will find something worthless (and he does occasionally–just ask him about his Frankenbike!), or what strange new “advantage” Barry will bring into play. There are so many unknowns in every episode that, essentially, we don’t know as much as the buyers themselves do, and that makes this very, very watchable.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Storage Wars Season One a full ten out of ten; you’re going to get a whole slew of great episodes here, some better than others, but most all of them impressive pieces of very watchable television.