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The easiest thing in the world is to bash outdoor TV; it’s such a fat pitch that a kind person should really try not to clobber it too often. So I promise not to do it again for a while. Anyway, after a long stint without watching any, I recently tried to sit down to a few shows.

I couldn’t do it.

I don’t know if the shows have gotten worse or if I’ve become less tolerant. But that very morning I’d sat in treestand, in 15-degree temps and blowing snow, for four hours, and yet I could not–in a warm house, sprawled on a cushy couch, with snacks–sit through two half-hour episodes. The goofy antics, the cliche barrage, the hootin’-n-hollerin’…. There was a moment, and I’m not kidding here, when I caught myself looking forward to my next colonoscopy.

But what really drove me over the edge, what forced me get up and leave, was the music, the somebody-please-please-stab-me-in-the-ear theme songs, like listening to today’s popular country while getting your teeth cleaned–and I don’t mean with the scrapey metal tool but with that awful, awful water-pick thing–except 783 times worse.

I came away ready to foreswear all outdoor TV, again, but when I got back, a friend and colleague had sent me the clip below in reaction to a conversation we’d had about the trite things said on TV by people sitting behind dead deer. Feeling oddly magnanimous at the time, I argued that those folks should get a pass because, well, what else are you going to say?

But then here is Steven Rinella of Meat Eater saying something else–something interesting and worth listening to. It’s a fine reminder that even if much of outdoor TV makes you want to dive into a bathtub of centipedes so as to make your situation slightly better, some of it is in fact “pretty tolerable” (as another friend and colleague put it just a minute ago over the phone), and a handful of shows are actually good.

Like I say, the easiest thing in the world is to bash outdoor TV, which is both fun to do and often deserved. Still, it’s far more important to praise what little of it is good, so that we might get more of it.