Me and Cara love to watch tv shows on Netflix and we've quickly found that out of all the endless possibilities that we could choose from, our perennial favorites are always things that are either totally genuine.. or just genuinely bad. Incidentally, there are two TV shows that happen to fall into each category and they have two things in common: both involve alligators and both are set in Louisiana. One is SWAMP PEOPLE, while the other is BILLY THE EXTERMINATOR. Ye don't need one dem fancy school degrees to know wich one go where....
All I needed to know about this series was that it's about men in small boats who use fishing hooks and hunting rifles to catch alligators in a huge swamp. The second after I read that description, I was done sold, let me tell ya. Even though it took a bit to get over the initial spectacle of the whole thing (Bruce), we quickly found that the show took a genuine and incredibly honest look at Cajun culture in a way that was never exploitative nor was it ever completely ridiculous...maybe just a little bit ridiculous (i.e. Willy catching snakes with socks on his arms). Its strongest aspect stems solely from the incredibly charismatic nature of all the people that are portrayed throughout the entire show. Instead of the hags from bullshit like "Real Housewives of [insert location]," SWAMP PEOPLE keeps it real and just follows around a bunch of normal, everyday folk who just happen to make a living by hunting gators. Whether it's Troy's nearly incomprehensible Cajun French accent, Junior's shrewd, humorously humorless personality, Mike Kleibert's incredible ingenuity and "swamp know-how" or Trapper Joe and Tommy's hilarious fights, not a single person portrayed ever hams it up for the camera the way other consistently less interesting reality show people (* cough cough * Billy the Exterminator cough *) are wont to do. SWAMP PEOPLE is a seriously good show that doesn't have to rely on cheap and ridiculous people doing stupid things; it's a show that relies on real life people doing real life things, like "chootin' gators."
This show is absolute garbage. The fact that it has been on air for almost 3 years and that it is on its 4th season is downright deplorable, not to mention completely dangerous considering the utter stupidity and clumsiness of its showrunner and his inept dumbass brother Ricky. Honestly, I'm genuinely surprised that the two of them haven't somehow gotten killed by something yet. I'm not imaging them going out like champs either, getting torn in half by a gator or getting bit by a rattlesnake, but by something like a loose ladder step, a faulty shingle, or a pile of raccoon shit that one of them will inevitably slip on while climbing a 40 foot tree in cowboy boots. According to the wikipedia article, Billy is "an expert in the field of pest control." BULLSHIT. There was one episode when he caught a huge 4 foot long cottonmouth and put the damn thing in a fucking paper-thin see-through plastic sack. There was another episode when he was literally stuck in the bottom of a drained pool and he couldn't get out because his boots and leather chaps didn't give him enough traction to CLIMB BACK OUT. What else is there to hate? How about the obviously staged phone call interludes inside Billy's truck ("What's that, Mom? Don't send Ricky in there because he is allergic to wasps? Got it!"), his completely impractical pseudo-black metal wardrobe choices (studded bracelets, spiked collars, bullet belts, SPURS?), and his uncanny skills at consistently losing his own freshly caught snakes in almost every episode. The only interesting thing that could ever come out of this series would be a documentary about how this total clown managed to hustle an entire TV network into giving him a show in the first place.
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