LITTLE ROCK — It’s the middle of summer and too hot for some to even get out on the lake and fish.
What better time to watch someone else do crazy things on the water? Or under the water?
Animal Planet and Discovery do their level best to satisfy the wacky fishing craving in all of us with two series.
Hillbilly Handfishin’ returns for Season 2 at 7 p.m. today on Animal Planet. At 8 p.m. Monday check out the new, and even more bizarre, Off the Hook: Extreme Catches on Discovery, which repeats Sundays at 8 p.m. on Animal Planet.
Let’s look at the new series first.
Off the Hook is hosted by passionate amateur angler and Total Nonstop Action professional wrestler “Showtime” Eric Young (formerly Super Eric of The Prince Justice Brotherhood with wrestlers Curry Man and Shark Boy).
I’ll let that sink in.
Young is a pro “rassler,” which means he (or at least his persona) is loud, flamboyant egocentric, quirky and hyperkinetic. As a reality host, Young still talks with a sort of growl and calls a lot of folks “bro.”
Young’s new adventure series “introduces viewers to America’s most bizarre, insane and inventive fishing techniques.”
Think Johnny Knoxville meets Bill Dance meets Hulk Hogan.
Intrigued? Of course you are. A pro wrestler doing insane fishing? Can’t lose. The first episode begins with a warning not to try these stunts at home.
Animal Planet informs us that Young is “an avid yet novice outdoorsman” and is “turning in his tights for some tackle on the adventure of a lifetime to hear, smell and taste big and small stories of the one that got away.”
Having Young be an amateur enthusiast is one of the brighter aspects of the series. He brings a sense of wonder along with his ebullience on the fishing road trips.
Young’s motivation (so he says) is to get his adrenaline fix by filling his need for adventure out of the ring. Each half-hour episode follows Young as he travels about the country trying his hand at unusual fishing practices that range from merely dangerous to all-out weird.
In the first episode, for example, Young learns how to catch sharks with pantyhose.
The camera follows Young into a Florida Dillard Department Store where he whispers to a clerk, “I’m looking for pantyhose.”
Then he’s shown browsing in the women’s department, poking around amid the lingerie and frilly girlie stuff.
Finally Young finds what he’s looking for and heads to the dock, where his guide explains the strange trip to the store.
It turns out that some savvy ocean anglers use pantyhose as the skin in making chum sausage. Sharks evidently love it and Young is after sharks.
To jazz things up, he’s going fishing for sharks while sitting atop a flimsy paddleboard. Crazy? Maybe. But it’s a lot safer than it looks and the water is all of 2 feet deep.
Future episodes will find Young fishing for sharks from a jet ski, spearfishing and nighttime squid jigging.
He’ll take us along as he fishes for dangerous alligator gar or invasive species like snakehead fish and those “flying” Asian silver carp in Illinois.
The series also purports to be educational since Young “learns an interesting array of intricate and industrious methods employed by some of America’s fishing masterminds.”
Each episode will feature two expert anglers.
A second episode follows at 8:30 p.m. today in which Young takes on a sailfish.
Landing a sailfish from a charter boat is difficult enough, but Young ups the ante by traveling to Miami in hopes of hooking the fish from a homemade raft made of plywood and an inner tube.
I won’t spoil it for you, but Young ends up drifting more than eight miles off the coast.
HILLBILLY HANDFISHIN’
It’s Season 2 for the good ol’ boys from Temple, Okla., at 7 p.m. today on Animal Planet.
If you missed the show last year, here’s all you need to know.
Skipper Bivins and Trent Jackson run an outfit that specializes in “noodling” — catching catfish with your bare hands.
Participants (usually city slickers) pay good money to wade with the boys into a nasty, murky, snake-infested Okie creek or lake, stick their hands into a large catfish hole under the bank, let the fish chomp down (they don’t have teeth) on their hand and haul it in.
If that’s not the basis for a reality show, then I don’t know what is.
TV Week, Pages 81 on 07/29/2012