It's summertime, which means new programming on the cable channels that no one watches. One of those new shows is "Alaska's Ultimate Bush Pilots," which follows the team of Island Air as they travel around Kodiak in the "pickup trucks of the north."
"Bush Pilots" gets some bonus points because it's only 30 minutes. However, about half the episode was spent recapping what happened before the commercial break, so really there was probably about 10 minutes of new content.
Surprise: Hunters get weathered in. Surprise: The weather in Kodiak is unpredictable. Surprise: Flying is dangerous. This is the narrative the "Bush Pilots" is very focused on. There are some great, seemingly staged scenes -- for example, when a group of hunters calls Island Air and says, "We need help and we need it soon." It's got a nice community theater kind of feel to it.
The Outdoor Channel clearly doesn't have a large budget, because each scene is accompanied by ominous instrumental music that sounds like it was put together on an iPhone. The cast is generally entertaining, but it seems like they got a bad edit in iMovie.
"The Last Alaskans" is a new show on Animal Planet about the last families living in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It plays like a 44-minute trailer for the show itself, introducing us to each family that lives in ANWR.
Like "Bush Pilots" there is also slightly creepy music and strange, abstract edits that cut to shots of fire, the tundra and winding rivers. Also like "Bush Pilots," the cast of the show is very clearly made up of true Alaskan badasses who are living in extreme places, manifesting their dreams.
"The Last Alaskans" seems to focus a lot on every family's tragedy in the first episode. There's a guy whose wife couldn't hack it and left him, a familiar story. There's another family who lost a child to one of the wild rivers in the Arctic. And then there's another dude who I think might be Daniel Day-Lewis doing a deep character study for his next film. He's got his family struggling to make it through the winter.
All these new shows start to blend with the old shows, and like an Anchorage restaurant catering to tourists, they don't have to be good or unique to get some traffic.
Finally, "Alaskan Bush People" starts a new season on Friday. If you haven't been following this show you can go deep in the Internet basement to find out the gossip and conspiracy theories surrounding the controversial Brown family. Shockingly, it seems the Browns are still outside of Hoonah, building up their compound for the cameras. As "Bush People" grows in popularity, more people who have encountered the Browns in real life are coming forward with stories about how it's all a sham. We'll dig into that next week.
For now, turn off the TV, go on some adventures, and soon enough someone will ask you to star in your own reality show. I'll keep watching TV so you don't have to.
Emily Fehrenbacher lives in Anchorage, where she reviews Alaska reality TV. You can reach her at realitycheck@alaskadispatch.com or on Twitter @ETFBacher.