Editor's note: This story was originally published in the August 5, 2021 Desert Companion newsletter.
Early in the first episode of the new HBO reality series Small Town News: KPVM Pahrump, there’s a sort of “Pahrump’s greatest hits” montage, with a quick succession of footage featuring Heidi Fleiss, the Chicken Ranch, donkey basketball, Dennis Hof, and alien abduction. It could set up the show as a mockery of the hicks and rubes of Pahrump, but it’s more like producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato want to get all that out of the way as soon as possible. Yes, there’s such stuff in Pahrump, they acknowledge, but there’s more to the town than that, and KPVM is a big part of it.
Small Town News doesn’t always find the right balance between the Pahrump grotesquerie and the human drama, but it’s still a watchable and sympathetic portrait of the scrappy independent TV station owned by Vernon Van Winkle. As the first episode notes, there are only about 95 independent TV stations left in the U.S., where the vast majority of local TV stations are owned by corporate conglomerates. Van Winkle has been running KPVM since 1997, and he embodies the independent/stubborn Wild West streak of Pahrump, for better or worse.
There’s a sitcom-style opening-credits sequence in each episode of Small Town News, and the mix of oddball characters at the station and in the town has a distinct Parks and Recreation vibe. Pahrump isn’t Pawnee, Indiana, but Small Town News makes it seem as close as possible, right down to the Ron Swanson-Leslie Knope dynamic between Van Winkle and his news director, Deanna O’Donnell. Van Winkle is a lot more emotionally open than Ron Swanson, but he’s a hardcore conservative who values independence and the free market, while O’Donnell is a Pahrump booster and a rare liberal in a red county.
The political divide becomes increasingly relevant over the course of the six-episode season, which starts with a January 2020 pilot episode then fast-forwards to September and beyond for the rest of the season, as KPVM deals with the pandemic and the impending presidential election. The show treats both of those serious events as fodder for goofy comedy at first, only getting to some somber reflections about the election at the end of the season. The pandemic seems mostly like a minor inconvenience for KPVM staffers and the residents of Pahrump, who are shown wearing masks far less frequently than they’re shown without them. And the clashing political viewpoints between Van Winkle and O’Donnell are also often played more for sitcom wackiness than as representative of the deep divide in American culture.
Pahrump is Trump country, and Small Town News treats that as just another Pahrump quirk, along with the brothels and the woman who buys airtime on KPVM in the middle of the night to broadcast her weird songs about alien encounters and dating Michael Jackson. Bailey and Barbato shy away from any true animosity, but they’re just following the lead of their subjects, who crack jokes with each other and clearly care deeply about the ragtag KPVM family, even when Van Winkle is spouting conservative conspiracy-theory talking points and O’Donnell is feebly protesting about the need for the news to remain unbiased.
Small Town News succeeds better when it focuses on the personal relationships among the staff and on the service that KPVM provides to the Pahrump community. Van Winkle is fixated on the station’s potential expansion to Las Vegas, which is set in motion in the first episode but then derailed by the pandemic. But it’s clear that KPVM’s greatest value is in the kind of local reporting that corporate-owned stations often lose sight of, and even the Pahrump ridiculousness highlighted in that opening-episode montage represents genuine community engagement.
It’s easy to laugh at the low-budget ads that KPVM creates for clients like local lawyers and real estate agents, or at the threadbare studio that O’Donnell and the rest of the on-air talent broadcast from (complete with dogs roaming freely). Weatherman and reporter John Kohler wears cargo shorts under his jacket and tie because they won’t be seen on camera, and he dresses in his outfit from his days as an Elvis impersonator to deliver the weather, just because he can.
But he’s also invested in the town that he and his wife and fellow on-air personality Missey have recently moved to, and they both take on multiple positions at KPVM to keep the station going. O’Donnell has been reporting on Pahrump news for 15 years, and she’s obviously a pillar of the community. Co-anchor Eunette Gentry commutes from Vegas (where she teaches journalism at CSN), but that doesn’t mean she takes Pahrump journalism less seriously.
All of these people are also entertaining characters to watch, and while Small Town News may carry the imprimatur of HBO Documentary Films, it can fit perfectly alongside Vegas-based reality shows like Pawn Stars or Counting Cars. Bailey and Barbato, who discovered KPVM while making a 2008 documentary about Heidi Fleiss, have a well-honed sense for the kind of personalities that make for good TV (they produce everything from RuPaul’s Drag Race to Million Dollar Listing). There are plenty of offbeat stories in Pahrump and at KPVM, and Small Town News’ first season just barely begins to explore them. If the show makes Pahrump look silly at times, that’s because Pahrump is silly — a trait that’s essential to its charm.
Small Town News: KPVM Pahrump is streaming on HBO Max.
