TV is the New Reading

Settle in for some ‘guy TV’

While other shows – that is, network shows that everyone has at least heard of – have been on winter break, I’ve been filling a few hours a week viewing shows ... fewer people have ever heard of. Essentially, I’ve been watching “guy TV.”

No, not golf, or other sports specifically, or “Tony Dean Outdoors” or the hilarious “MXC” elimination challenge where Asian people try to make it through bizarre obstacle courses wearing unwieldly costumes and fall awkwardly. Those shows absolutely have their place and are naturally quite a draw.

And it’s not on Spike TV or FX, although a lot of “guy TV” is. In fact, it might be a little strange to suggest that one of these series is in fact on the Sundance independent theater channel.

‘Nimrod Nation’

Out on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula there’s a group of folks who are just the most familiar group of folks you’re likely to meet. They hunt, they fish, they play basketball and talk about basketball, they rag on each other for a million different reasons. A lot of them went to the local high school. They’re the Fighting Nimrods of Watersmeet, Mich.

The show is essentially a documentary following a group of seniors on the varsity lineup who’ve been playing together since they were in the third grade, so it’s a significant year for the team. The point is made early on that a “nimrod” is a mighty hunter and warrior, so they wear the name as a badge of honor.

Life in Watersmeet moves at a different pace from most other television, and apart from the practices and games and pep rallies and rivalries, there’s time for the camera to follow the players around as they hunt and field dress their deer and go on dates and practice skeet shooting and kid around with each other. They film the old guys talking in the cafe and they air weather forecasts from the local radio station saying it’s not gonna get above zero all week – that sort of thing.

When the focus is on basketball, the team does work really hard. The coach’s son is in the starting lineup and the coach is pretty fatherly to all of them. He does what he can to motivate his players to play their best, and when they don’t he’s pretty understanding although he lets them know when he’s disappointed.

Of course, even though the production isn’t censored in the least, it seems pretty clear that if there weren’t a camera present, people would probably behave at least a little bit differently from how they do actually behave. And more than once I thought that probably the players would do better if they didn’t have the added pressure of a camera on them both on and off the court.

Check your listings, but they’ve been airing “Nimrod Nation” in the mornings, usually around 8 a.m.

‘Corner Gas’

Over on the Chicago station WGN, a Canadian production makes an occasional late-night appearance, and if you can find it I recommend it. It’s called “Corner Gas,” and it’s centered in Dog River, a small town somewhere outside Toronto.

There aren’t a whole lot of cast members and the show isn’t too complex. There’s the guy who owns the service station, his folks, his hare-brained assistant, a couple of cops and the woman who owns the cafe. She’s from out of town and can’t do anything without everyone in town getting mad at her in some predictably unpredictable way.

She once tried to save the town’s grain elevator, because she overheard a couple of older gentlemen say it was a historic landmark. So after she got it declared as one by the historical society so it couldn’t be destroyed, everyone got mad at her because it was really just an eyesore and besides, it was infested with rats. And she couldn’t fill in the pothole in front of her cafe because people would just tear through town at top speed unless the pothole was there.

But always the voice of reason among a townful of eccentric hot-heads, the service station owner calms everyone down and gets everything back to normal.

As I indicated, the show isn’t the most stable show on the grid. Sometimes WGN airs two of them back to back. Sometimes the network airs only one, and sometimes none at all. But if you see it’s going to be on, there are definitely worse things you can watch.

People dressed as giant babies navigating badly-dubbed obstacle courses on giant plastic snails, for instance. Oy.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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