Reed Timmer: A Dominating Moron


Did you ever know the guy in your class who had the parents who convinced their shining idiot offspring that he was God's gift to everyone he should ever meet? I think if I had a time machine I'd like to go back and not only kick the 8 year-old Reed in the shins, but give his parents the beat down they so richly deserve for producing such an excruciating example of arrogance, misplaced confidence and dorkiness.

Reed Timmer is one of the most memorable characters on the Discovery Channel's TV program Stormchasers. While the other major character built himself a low-grade urban assault vehicle for catching funnels on film, Reed and his band of dimwitted accomplices pile into an SUV, each wielding a hand-held camera and an apparent disposition for self-destruction.

What makes Reed different than the other storm chasers crawling the rural byways of tornado alley is his personality which makes him sound, look and behave like a lost frat boy, treating tornadoes like rush at the Theta house. His apparent oblivion to the fact that everyone else in the car is there for the exact same reason is made clear by his insistence on shouting out the obvious at every opportunity, yelling at his driver to look at the passing funnel cloud (because driving a truck in 150 mph winds is secondary to looking up into the clouds) and making it clear to all of the audiences of Discovery Channel that he will likely marry three times, end up in a lower-middle market TV station reading the five-day forecast all the while reminding his coworkers of how he got beaned in the head by a flying cow that one time...

I enjoy seeing personalities that I absolutely disgust from a long distance off. In this instance, I knew almost immediately that should Reed and I ever be forced to share a hotel room, soon after he went to sleep I would find myself trying to suspend a chest of drawers of his sleeping body, waiting for the instant he woke up the next morning before releasing the rope.
The problem is that I enjoy the TV series, for much the same reason that I enjoyed the film Twister. If only Reed could get himself so close to an F5 in his quest for a super awesome killer dominating close-up that he'd get hisself sucked up into a vortex the Discovery Channel would surely have the season finale that would guarantee the series' admission into a rare canon of television programs.