Discovery Channel plays a little show every Friday night called Gold Rush. The first season was merely a small camera crew following a small group of down on their luck, wanna be gold miners. These guys new the basics of how to mine for gold and they seemed to have fairly good knowledge of how to run Dozers and Excavators. The season was full of mishaps and tiny bits of glory. It was the learning curve of figuring out what NOT to do when mining for gold that made the show so entertaining. People liked it, people watched, Discovery noticed.
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| Grandpa Schnabel |
We started watching the show because Dave, like so many other men, has a deep desire to mine for gold. Any man I speak with about the show seems to have it too. It doesn't appeal to me as a thing I'd like to try one day. Now I'm not suggesting that I have more "normal" dreams (to be the One Last Lonely Girl chosen to be serenaded on stage by the Biebs), but the panning for gold thing seems to be a common one for men. It's all part of the American Dream. This explains the allure of the show....and grandpa Schnabel. If you don't know grandpa Schnabel, you really are missing out.
Fast forward to season three and the guys you first met are still there, still dumb as hell and hilarious. But now they have a couple of other mining crews and the show is produced on a much larger scale. They also show clips of a VERY successful Alaskan gold miner by the name of Tony Beets. I adore that crazy ass Tony Beets. I just want to hang out with him, and pick his brain a bit. He has some sort of rock star appeal about him. I don't find him attractive, but I want to be around him. He's a no nonse gold mining bad ass. As much as I love Gold Rush, I would be a hardcore fan of a Tony Beets show as well (hint hint ).
We still watch the show, but it's almost tiring just watching it. Each episode is an hour long and the season will probably have about 15 episodes. The trouble is that I have a sneaking suspicion that there might only be three solid hours of footage to fill the whole season. This of course means that there will be tons of commercials and tons of repeating. After every commercial break, there will be at least two minutes of catch up narration. You could seriously start watching the show for the first time today and be fully caught up on everything that has happened over the last two seasons and the start of this one.
The good thing about it is that Discovery Channel has targeted an audience that not many do. Those with short term memory loss and those with Alzheimer's. My memory is poor, and I LOVE to hear Tony Beets wisdom, so I'll keep watching.
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