'Swamp People,'
still thrills and chills
The drama is certainly hyped on this returning History series
By Tom Conroy
Feb 22, 2012
Sometimes it all depends on whom we choose to believe.
In the first episode of Discovery’s series “Beast Tracker,” airing early this month, the host went alligator hunting in Louisiana with an elderly local as he made his rounds in the bayou, tugging in the gators caught on his baited hooks and calmly dispatching them with gunshots to the head. “I’m surprised by how little drama is involved,” the host said.
A week later, History’s hit series “Swamp People” kicked off its third season of showing us how alligator hunting in Louisiana is a perilous enterprise in which the hunters constantly risk dismemberment or death as they dodge the snapping jaws of the ferocious primordial beasts.
If we grant that every reality show hypes the drama to some extent — and consider the possibility that Discovery was enviously taking a poke at a rival network — then “Swamp People” still can be a lot of fun. The action is visually striking and, despite what we may have heard, convincingly scary. More important, the hunters are likable and colorful, without the artificial color that most reality shows feel the need to add.
Airing Thursdays at 9 p.m., the show has the added advantage of fungibility. Viewers can tune in late to an episode or to a season and not feel they’ve missed anything. Any slice of the show will be pretty much like any other one.
The show focuses on the month-long period during which alligators can be legally hunted in Louisiana. Each hunter gets a certain number of tags, one of which must be attached to each catch; when they’re all used up, the hunter’s season is done.
Though the hunters all talk with strong bayou accents, they’re a diverse bunch. The most popular among longtime fans are probably Troy Landry and his partner Clint, who handles the guns — hence Troy’s catchphrase, “Choot ’em, Clint!” Troy’s helper from last season, Liz Cavalier, is on her own this year, working with a young woman named Kristi Broussard.
Though the down-home narration occasionally suggests rivalries among the various hunters, most of them are working far from one another and seem much more concerned with filling their own quota than with how the other hunters are doing.
Much of each episode follows the routine shown in that episode of “Beast Tracker,” but this show almost always finds some peril, whether because the alligators lunge at the hunters when their line is being grabbed or because the hunters put themselves in harm’s way. We’re constantly seeing shots of feet and hands underwater or in deep grass, taken from what would be the gators’ point of view.
The show finds other ways of building drama. In this season’s premiere episode, Troy and Clint are hunting for an especially large alligator that the locals have reportedly nicknamed the Godfather. The narrator stresses that the men are doing this to protect their neighbors and not because they get paid by the foot.
Bruce Mitchell, a hefty hunter who usually works alone, is partnering with a former military sharpshooter named Ron Methvin. According to the narrator, alligators have a very small “kill spot” in the back of their heads, so this allows for some tension as Ron lies in wait for a big specimen to swim by.
The boating action is usually worth watching. A father and son team named R.J. and Jay Paul Molinere travel in an airboat, which is always fun to see. At one point, Troy tries to jump a levee in a shallow-draft boat.
Every now and then, the hunters behave like the boring tough guys we see too often in reality TV. In this season’s second episode, R.J. and Jay Paul get into a territorial dispute with some newbie hunters, occasioning some tedious chest thumping.
“Swamp People” doesn’t need hyped-up drama like this. This is the kind of show we watch to see the same thing happen over and over. If we doze off, we know we can catch more of the same later.
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