New Travel TV For Adventure Junkies: ‘Reel Rock’

by McLean Robbins on


If you liked the REEL ROCK climbing and adventure tour, or you’re just a fan of hard knocks-style travel TV in the vein of “Man vs. Wild,” you’ll love this new TV series on Outside Television.

Produced by Emmy award winning filmmakers and backed by The North Face and Gore-Tex, this new weekly show takes footage from the 300-city tour and condenses the very best moments into a weekly TV program starting on January 23.

Each episode follows climbing and mountain adventurers as they attempt to scale the world’s most dizzying heights and scariest cliff faces – with varying degrees of success.

Shot entirely in high-definition, the show features pretty incredible scenery, including El Capitan in Yosemite, the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, and the ice-strewn Helmcken Falls deep in the Canadian Rockies.

“Our mission is to bring the transcendence of the outside world into people’s living rooms and immerse them into a state of majesty unlike anything they might have experienced before,” says Rob Faris, senior vice president of programming and production for Outside Television in a release. “We not only want to reward anyone who engages in rock climbing as a personal passion, but also inspire others to embrace the magnificence that mountain adventure uniquely possesses.”

We’re pretty sure we’ll tune in, at least for the first episode. The trailer (above) looks pretty cool.

Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV): Part V

by Rolf Potts on
Where does the Travel Channel take us? Rolf Potts embarks on a
one-week gonzo experiment to find out

THE REAL WORLD IS LACKING IN PLOT-RESOLUTION

Day 5, Hour 67: 12:53pm. This morning, while playing hooky from my Travel Channel marathon, I was nearly robbed by a couple of con artists in a downtown Las Vegas alleyway. Or at least I think I was.

It all started during Chowdown Countdown, a program which (in keeping with the junk-food programming of the past couple days) was on a six-hour mission to reveal the top 100 places in America to eat oneself into a food coma. I lost my patience with the show three hours in, and went out to wander the streets of downtown Las Vegas.

I wasn’t two blocks from my hotel when an over-friendly fellow wearing mirrored sunglasses sidled up and asked me the time. His blond hair was parted in the middle and gray at the roots, and he sported a faded flannel shirt that made him look like a lumberjack from some 1980’s paper towel commercial. I told him it was half past eleven; he fell into step with me and announced that he was a professional gambler. After a few minutes of banter, he suggested I go with him to “win some money” at the Golden Nugget casino.

Everything about this man’s manner — his calculated gregariousness, his curiosity about how long I’d been in town, his quick insistence on moving to a different location — marked him as a tourist-town hustler. But after four days in front of a hotel-room TV, I was as energized by the novelty of human conversation as I was curious to know what he was up to. As we walked and talked a few more blocks, however, the man made brief eye contact with a wiry, hard-faced, brown-haired guy who fell into step behind us when we took a shortcut through a parking-garage alley. Suddenly spooked, I spun on my heels and walked back out to the street. Neither man said anything or tried to stop me.Now, back in my room, still hopped up on adrenaline, I’m having trouble focusing on the Travel Channel’s ongoing parade of cheeseburgers and jumbo burritos and cheery voice-overs. What kind of scam, I wonder, were the paper-towel lumberjack and his partner running? Was it some orchestrated grift that involved actual gambling, or was it a standard-issue mugging? Was it a day-long confidence scheme designed to fool me out of thousands, or were they just looking to score a fast ten or twenty? Is it possible that the guy wasn’t a con artist at all — just an oddly outgoing gambler with a creepy friend?

It’s difficult to know for sure, since — unlike the folks on television — I don’t have a voice-over narrator to explain what just happened.

IT’S NOT THAT HARD TO MAKE FUN OF TELEVISION

Day 5, Hour 78: 10:46pm. The home stretch of my TV marathon is devoted to two hours of a show called America’s Worst Driver. On the screen, half-a-dozen contestants take turns steering their cars through a wacky parking-lot obstacle course. The loser, we are continually reminded, will have their car destroyed by some kind of giant robotic dinosaur. I glance down at my notebook, where after 45 minutes of watching this show, I’ve scribbled and underlined a single word: “Forgettable!” I can’t help but think how much better this show would be if it skipped the obstacle course and forced contestants to, say, pass a driving course in Beijing, or ride motorcycles across India’s Grand Trunk Road during the monsoon, or steer school buses through the Peruvian Andes.

Part of my ambivalence with America’s Worst Driver, no doubt, is rooted in the repetition and physical tedium of experiencing TV nonstop for the better part of one week. Had I just watched, say, the “Rolf Potts is Awesome Channel” for the past 78 waking hours, I’d probably be ready to strangle myself about now. Still, shows like America’s Worst Driver underscore how reliably shallow and brainless the Travel Channel has been since I started watching it nearly five days ago.

Back in the 1990s, when television was thought to have a much greater influence on Americans’ lives than it does now, media critic Mark Crispin Miller noted that part of TV’s appeal lies in its very vacuousness. “We watch TV because we know it is stupid,” he wrote, “and we enjoy the feeling of superiority it provides.” This in mind, much of what I’ve said in the past five days is inseparable from my own, faintly snobby assumptions of what the Travel Channel should be in the first place. As someone who’s been fortunate enough to wander the world on the cheap for much of the past 15 years, I love travel best when it’s slow, immersive, global in scope, and laced with ambiguity — qualities that don’t always lend themselves to the attention-span-driven demands of commercial television. Indeed, to obsess too much on the shortcomings of the Travel Channel would be (to paraphrase the Buddha) akin to complaining that a banana tree won’t bear mangoes.

In a way, what I’ve been doing here all week is a rather quaint exercise. Part of the reason I don’t own a television is that one doesn’t really need to anymore. If I’m really interested in seeing a given TV show I can usually stream it on my laptop — and some of the best new video content, travel or otherwise, is made by amateurs and uploaded to sites like YouTube. One of the most jarring aspects of watching a traditional TV channel all week has been sitting through the ads — something I don’t have to endure when I have the option of checking headlines or multitasking emails in another browser tab. Thus, the glut of advertisements I’ve seen on the Travel Channel (31 per hour on average, according to my notes) makes cable television feel like a throwback to another era. Were it not for the wearying repetition, these earnest little come-ons for Kool Aid and Meow Mix and Kraft Singles would feel charmingly nostalgic.

Even after the appearance of the giant robotic dinosaur, I’m at a loss for what else I might say about America’s Worst Driver. I stay up until the credits roll at midnight, then end my Travel Channel marathon with an unceremonious thumb to the remote control.

WHAT TRAVEL TV COULD ONE DAY BECOME (BUT PROBABLY WON’T)

Day 6, Hour 80 (plus 3): 11:11am. A few hours before I fly out of Las Vegas, I find myself flipping through the TV channels while I wait for the airport shuttle. Sick as I am of the Travel Channel, I’m soon engrossed in a No Reservations rerun that investigates the cuisine (and, by proxy, the history, culture, and economics) of the Texas-Mexico border area.

If there were an ideal indicator of what the Travel Channel could one day become, it would be Anthony Bourdain’s refusal to devolve into a telegenic caricature. The No Reservations host is consistently hip and insightful and funny — but what makes his show stand out is that he’s not afraid to express his real opinion about things. It’s astonishing how seldom this happens on travel shows. The Travel Channel sheepishly alludes to this in its Bourdain promo teasers, suggesting that there’s an upbeat, camera-friendly “Good Tony,” who likes what he eats and sees, and a snarky, irritable “Bad Tony,” who drinks too much, despises culinary clichés, and ridicules his producers. In other words, Bourdain has the temerity to express a point of view that goes beyond the tidy, self-contained dictates of television.

In the Texas-Mexico border episode, for example, Bourdain refuses to buy into stereotypes — pointing out how American perceptions of Mexican border towns are “more a reflection of our own darker, wilder sides than a true reflection of Mexico.” His take on Mexican drug culture is equally pointed: “With all the attention Mexico’s drug cartels have gotten satisfying America’s bottomless hunger for illegal drugs,” he says, “you might be surprised to find there’s nearly as much business catering to grandma’s bladder-control problem or grandpa’s erectile dysfunction.” As he travels the border region, eating street-food tacos in Mexico and chicken-fried steak in Texas, Bourdain variously pokes fun at his cameraman, debunks the notion that nachos are authentically Mexican, alludes to George Orwell, buys a stash of Demerol, and meets a Veracruz-born chef who prepares the finest Japanese cuisine in Laredo.

In hosting a show so stubbornly wedded to his unique sensibilities, Bourdain hints at a universally relevant notion: that travel — if one can view it as more than a consumer act — has a way of revealing a world more complicated and exasperating and unexpectedly delightful than one could ever imagine sitting at home.

The ironic implication here, of course, is that one can’t experience this richer world without first turning off the television.

Twenty-three hotel floors above downtown Las Vegas, I brandish the remote and do just that.

[Read more of Rolf Potts’ series Around the World in 80 Hours here]

Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV): Part 4

by Rolf Potts on
Where does the Travel Channel take us? Rolf Potts embarks on a
one-week gonzo experiment to find out

AMERICA: IT’S WHERE FAT PEOPLE ARE MADE

Day 4, Hour 50: 9:25 am. The narrator of a show called Breakfast Paradise has just announced that he’s found a restaurant that will indulge my “deepest cereal fantasies.” An hour ago, at a Texas barbecue joint, the same narrator suggested that I would “need a shower after plowing through a mountain of mouthwatering meat.” This voice-over specialist, who according to the credits is a guy named Mason Pettit, narrates most of the Travel Channel‘s non-hosted shows. All of his lines — be they about cheeseburgers or deep-fried candy bars — take on the same breathless, self-excited cadences that commercials use when trying to convince football fans that drinking light beer makes them more attractive to beautiful women.

Curious to know how much more food programming I’ll have to endure over the next two days, I break one of my self-isolation ground rules: I crack open my laptop, pay the hotel’s $9.95 Internet access fee, and check the Travel Channel’s broadcast schedule online. Here, I discover that — in the 31 hours of television I have left to watch — 6 hours are devoted to theme parks (Extreme Terror Rides, Extreme Water Parks), 2 hours are slated for a reality game-show (America’s Worst Driver), and a whopping 23 hours are given over to binge-eating or junk food (Man v. Food, Chowdown Countdown, etc). None of these shows suggest that travel might involve non-consumer experiences, and none of them appear to stray beyond the borders of the United States. Even shows that imply international scope are weirdly agoraphobic: Yesterday, a show called World’s Best Megastructures ignored the Pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China, electing instead to focus on such engineering feats as the New Orleans Superdome and the Mall of America.I wonder how an Asian or a European might perceive this kind of programming. In previous decades, the global popularity of TV shows like Gunsmoke, Dallas, and Baywatch lent a breezy sense of glamour and intrigue to the notion of American identity. The Travel Channel, on the other hand, seems to suggest that 21st-century Americans are noisy, incurious half-wits who spend most of their time riding roller coasters and gobbling down oversized portions of greasy food.

THE PRO WRESTLING OF CULINARY RIVALRY

Day 4, Hour 51: 10:41 pm. I’m trying to think of a way to describe the sensation I get while watching a series called Food Wars. The best analogy I’ve come up with is “time travel”: I feel like it’s 1991, and the writers of The Simpsons have dreamed up a farcical future where life’s most banal diversions have been transformed into idiotic game shows.

At its most basic level, Food Wars doesn’t seem like an inadvertent parody. The program explores how a given dish (hot wings, Italian beef, cheese-steak) has evolved into an authentic expression of culinary life in an urban community. Each episode examines local restaurant rivalries (Al’s Beef v. Mr. Beef in Chicago; Duff’s v. Anchor Bar in Buffalo), and uses blindfolded taste-tests to determine which joint serves the best meals.

Unfortunately, the show’s producers have infused these civic food rivalries with a sense of hyperbole and fake enthusiasm usually reserved for professional wrestling matches. Each Food Wars episode features awkwardly staged sequences where supporters of rival restaurants march through the streets waving homemade banners and screaming insults at each other; other segments feature breathless talk of “top-secret” recipes, and commercial-break cliffhangers promising “shocking” conclusions. The host, a petite, high-strung brunette named Camille Ford, spends a good portion of each episode pumping her fist in the air and yelling her lines over crowd noise. Dramatic music accompanies the final segment, as portly white folks masticate chicken wings or beef sandwiches in slow-motion close-up, their chins smeared in hot sauce, their teeth slicked with animal fat.

According to the schedule, Food Wars: Buffalo and Food Wars: Chicago will be rebroadcast twice more today — which means I have until bedtime to come up with a plausible theory for how shows like this end up on the Travel Channel.

TV MARATHONER GETS STUFFED

Day 4, Hour 60: 7:32 pm. Midway through the evening showing of Food Wars I lose my patience and head downstairs to wander the gaudy, mazelike corridors of the Plaza Hotel casino. I’ve been living on bottled water, baby carrots, and trail-mix all week, so I’ve decided to splurge on a meal at the Plaza’s buffet restaurant, which is, appropriately, called “Stuffed.”

Like most thrift-conscious Middle Americans, I cannot discipline myself in all-you-can-eat environments. After several platefuls of lukewarm food (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, lasagna), I stumble back to my room, unbuckle my belt, and turn on an episode of what turns out to be Extreme Pig Outs. Watching this show on an overfull stomach is kind of like barricading oneself into a broom closet to watch a show about claustrophobia. Nauseated, I fetch the remote, and — for the first time in more than 60 waking hours — change the station.

As I surf through the channels, I’m stunned by how much travel programming I find outside of the Travel Channel. VH1’s Price of Beauty shows Jessica Simpson interacting with Indians in Bombay; the Discovery Channel’s Man v. Wild shows Bear Grylls trekking through the Moroccan Sahara. An Animal Channel program examines the lives of Africans who live on an elephant preserve; a History Channel show depicts Mexican migrant workers embarking on a less-than-romantic sojourn through California’s produce fields.

I flip my way through the channels, spotting more depictions of the non-American world in one hour than I’ve seen in four days of watching the Travel Channel.

WHY DOESN’T THE TRAVEL CHANNEL TRAVEL?

Day 4, Hour 64: 11:53 pm. After three hours of channel surfing, I’ve noticed that my lizard-brain subconscious is intrinsically drawn to flashy, noisy, high-energy shows. The sight of an exploding car, for instance, sucks me into 20 minutes of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters; the spectacle of a soccer riot inspires me to watch two segments of MSNBC’s Caught on Camera. At one point I’m flipping through channels when I’m entranced by a mob of frumpy Americans chanting in unison inside of a restaurant. I watch, intrigued, for ten full beats before I realize that the mob’s attention is focused on three people eating hot wings.

I have, it appears, been suckered into another rerun of Food Wars.

Pay close attention to the end-credits of Food Wars, and you’ll see that it’s created by the same production company that found ratings success with Man v. Food. These two programs are emblematic of what appears to be the Travel Channel’s status quo: Both shows are less about travel than junk food; both are saturated with overstatement and phony energy; both are hosted by loud, charismatic actors whose talents lie less in culinary insight than standard-issue enthusiasm (sample comment: “I’m a little star-struck by this food’s awesomeness!”). In addition to being able to lure in random channel surfers (including me) with such off-kilter energy, both Food Wars and Man v. Food use a contrived sense of competition to tease out that old Aristotelian dramatic question: “How will this all turn out?” Somehow, this keeps enough folks watching to make these shows popular.

Fifty years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin noted that mass media is less about its content than its audience. “The mass, in our world of mass media, is the target and not the arrow,” he wrote in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “It is the ear and not the voice. The mass is what others aim to reach.” As I watch Food Wars for the third time today, I sense that the Travel Channel has no guiding philosophy beyond raw ratings numbers. Were producers able to attract a sizeable audience for, say, Macramé Wars, or Man v. Hygiene, I’m certain the Travel Channel would make room on its schedule.

I have 16 waking hours left in my television marathon, and it feels like the whimsical travel metaphors that inspired this experiment have yet to find much traction: I may as well be watching a network called the “TV Channel.”

[Read more of Rolf Potts’ series Around the World in 80 Hours here]