Between the several different Pawn Stars shows and spinoffs on History, Hardcore Pawn on truTV, and TLC’s Pawn Queens, the market is pretty saturated with pawn shop-oriented programming. This hasn’t deterred CMT, however, who will be jumping into the game with a brand new reality program called Win Lose or Pawn.
CMT announced the news on Tuesday and the network already seems hellbent on moving forward with Win Lose or Pawn. Currently, few details about how this pawn shop-based program will stand out from the pack are available, but the network did let Deadline in on the fact that casting is well underway for the new series, so CMT fans will be seeing episodes soon. The show is currently casting in Southern California, with the network looking for two sorts of people: those who are looking to pawn an item and those who simply want to get an appraisal of a, hopefully big ticket, item.
The most exciting thing about the new reality series is that it will run daily on the network, which is a first for CMT. Win Lose or Pawn was created by Phil Gurin of The Gurin company and will also be executive produced by Gurin, alongside Eric Evangelista and CMT’s Jayson Dinsmore, Joe Livecchi and Eliot Goldberg. Gurin has a long and storied history as an executive producer, having covered everything from a slew of beauty pageants to Chuck Woolery: Naturally Stoned. He’s probably most famous for running reality TV programming, including The Weakest Link, The Singing Bee, and Shark Tank. I’m not surprised CMT would want to lure Gurin over to the network, but I’m still not sure how Win Lose or Pawn will be able to bring in a major or even decent audience. This show is coming at the wrong end of the pawn shop phase and I only see a long, hard road ahead.
