With so much daylight it's hard to make myself stay inside and watch the ol' goggle-box, but then I discovered Destination America's new show "Alaska Monsters." Joining programs like "Party Down South" and "Wild West Alaska," "Alaska Monsters" is now in my "Top Five Shows So Bad They're Almost Watchable" list.
So "Alaska Monsters" is about The Midnight Sons, a ragtag group of bearded misfits with oddly specific monster-hunting specialties who travel around the Alaska Triangle looking for Bigfoot, saberwolf, the otterman and other creatures that generally don't exist.
My personal favorite was the otterman, a shape-shifting giant otter monster that apparently lives in the Mat-Su, or as the show calls it, "Zone 10: Valley of the Lost Gold." Maybe a more appropriate name would be "Zone 10: Valley of the Big Box Stores."
From what I can tell, every episode starts with the guys sitting around a barn talking about what kind of monster they are going to go looking for. Mysteriously, they are always wearing the same clothes and sitting in the same spots. Here's a sample conversation:
Little Bear (the leader): "Gentlemen, we are here to hunt down Central Alaska's Bigfoot, known as 'the Bushman.' "
Crusty (the researcher): "Report is that Central Alaska's Bigfoot varies in size anywhere from 6.5 to 9, 10 feet tall. Weighing 7,000 to 10,000 pounds."
Levi (the tech expert): "We grow 'em big in Alaska."
Little Bear: "Everything's big in Alaska."
Face (the expert tracker): "We are the Last Frontier."
The entire show is like this, the dialogue made up almost entirely of non-sequitur clichés. The standout character is obviously Face, an expert tracker with a beard ponytail. He's the comedian of the cast, complete with pratfalls and fart jokes. "Smell that? I was leading the group, because I'm brave. That was Bushman doo doo," he says while tracking the Bushman.
So after they leave the barn, they travel to their "zone" of the Alaska Triangle and meet a local who has had an encounter with the monster. In the first episode a construction manager, Dan, is looking for the Bushman after his entire crew left following a scary encounter. I was impressed with Dan's commitment to character as he said, "You tell me what scares that many men so much they won't come into work. These boys don't spook easy."
Then basically the rest of the episode looks like it was shot through some 1992 "Jurassic Park" night-vision goggles.
As they trudge through the woods looking for the Bushman, they come across comical 18-inch tracks and find giant piles of logs: "Only one thing that could do this out here, and it's the Bushman." Everyone knows that Bigfoot is known for stacking logs, right?
Finally after their tech guy, Levi, gets tired of using his drone to track giant piles of sticks, they decide to use their thermal sensor to find the Bushman. All of a sudden they all start screaming: "Look at the size of the sucker." Then the rest of the episode is basically a bunch of dudes running around in the woods late at night waving guns.
The climax is when one of the Midnight Sons is lying in the woods holding a knife when trees above him start to shake and there is a hilarious monster growling sound that sounds like it came from a "Haunted House Spooky Sounds" soundtrack.
They then show the guy with the knife and his camera man running back to the group, freaking out. The Bushman has scratched up their trap, and we never even got a sight of him. The episode ends without ever finding the monster, and they are on to their next adventure to catch the famous saberwolf of Healy, which bites the heads off its victims.
While I don't recommend it as a reality show, it's a helluva campy scripted sitcom.
Emily Fehrenbacher lives in Anchorage, where she reviews Alaska reality TV. You can reach her at realitycheck@alaskadispatch.com or on Twitter @ETFBacher.