Gunnarson dedicated to his craft, but it doesn’t translate into great TV

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2015 (3811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s impossible not to have a grudging kind of admiration for Dean Gunnarson.

He has, for more than 30 years, remained determined in his quest to be known as the world’s greatest escape artist, despite the fact it isn’t a title to which many lay claim these days, and it’s an entertainment form that doesn’t command nearly the kind of public attention it did during the long-ago era of his hero, Harry Houdini.

But Gunnarson soldiers on, chaining himself to and hanging himself from things and then executing last-second escapes to save himself from being crushed, smashed, burned, shredded, soaked and/or flattened by a variety of big, dangerous things.

These days, Gunnarson has a new vehicle to bring his spectacles to a mass audience, in the form of a TV series, Escape or Die!, which debuts tonight at 8 on the Rogers-owned specialty channel OLN.

The 13-part reality series follows the Winnipeg-born performer as he travels to remote locales all over the world to attempt new and ever-more-dangerous escapes. And in each episode, Gunnarson and his support team design, construct and test the escapes in the workshop at his ranch near Riding Mountain National Park in western Manitoba.

The series première focuses on an escape that requires Gunnarson to free himself from chains holding him to a roller coaster’s tracks in time to avoid being hit by its onrushing cars at more nearly 100 km/h.

The coaster is in an amusement park in Shanghai, and the stunt forces Gunnarson to revisit an earlier coaster stunt that ended in near-disaster when his leap from the tracks occurred milliseconds too late; he was clipped by the decorative wings on the coaster cars and suffered multiple fractures to his foot.

Back on his ranch, in a workshop dubbed the Morgue, Gunnarson and his team — safety co-ordinator Jeff Gunnarson, theatrics expert Cary Tardi and newcomer and “Jill of all trades” Ava Darrach-Gagnon — prepare for the stunt by studying film footage and using miniature mock-ups to plan out the trick.

In a particularly cheesy segment of the series première, the group travels to nearby Onanole to do a simulation of the stunt on a rusty old kids’ coaster. There’s much hand-wringing and head-shaking as the anything-but-fast-moving ride plows down an undersized crash-test dummy that has been chained to the tracks; the reason for the small-scale smash-up, says Jeff, is to “show Dean what’s going to happen if the coaster hits him.”

The scene is overloaded with huckster-ish showmanship and reality-TV contrivance, but it’s perfectly in keeping with the promotional build-up required to effectively sell a “death-defying” escape stunt.

Cameras follow as Gunnarson says goodbye to wife Donna and his two daughters and heads off to catch his flight overseas to Shanghai. A couple of days are spent preparing stunt equipment and measuring and timing the coaster’s runs, and then on the Big Day, Gunnarson bounds up to the escape site in a leopard-print blazer (which he quickly discards) and is chained to the tracks just before the empty coaster cars are set in motion.

With his crew members shouting out times at 10-second intervals, Gunnarson struggles against his shackles. There’s no desire here to spoil what happens as the coaster rounds the final peak and speeds down toward the escape artist… but this is, it bears repeating, the première of a 13-episode series.

Actually, it’s that moment when the roller coaster — with a camera mounted on its front car — reaches the top and starts its descent toward Gunnarson that offers the most telling glimpse at the real nature of his peril: Gunnarson stands chained to the tracks below, and it’s a crowd of not much more than a couple of dozen that looks on.

Despite all attempts — this series included — to make it seem otherwise, the great-escape stunt is a spectacle genre of bygone days. And if the crowds that show up to watch Gunnarson perform live are this sparse, what can be expected of the TV audience for a show like this on an out-of-the-way cable network?

Chains and cages and shackles might be manageable challenges for Gunnarson, but the reality of escape artistry’s place in the modern entertainment landscape might be a peril from which no one — not even the world’s greatest — can escape.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @BradOswald