Swamp People: More gophers please!

Christmas is kind of a dead time for television which gives me cover as to why I watched “Swamp People” a night or two ago.

The History Channel reality series focuses on several alligator hunters in the swamps in South Louisiana and Mississippi. The episode I watched featured gator hunter Troy Landry cooking up a pot of gator gumbo, I suppose after he “choot ’em.” His sometime partner Liz Cavalier came to the gumbo cooking and I have to say she done clean up well. Well, not a super model but she had her hair done.

What is confounding about the show is it makes everyone around those parts seem as if all they do is “choot” gators. That is, of course, far from the truth. Many fish, shrimp, grow and smuggle weed, raise dem crawfish, that sort of thing. The whole show makes me feel as if these people strive for a living embodiment of “Amos Moses.” I am talking the mythical gator hunter made famous in the early 1970s by singer and actor Jerry Reed. You know Amos, ” … He could trap the biggest, the meanest alligator, and just use one hand. That’s all he got left ’cause alligator bit it! Left arm gone clean up to the elbow,” Jerry sang with glee (Not “Glee” the TV series.)

Swamp People isn’t a bad show. It’s not a great show and it’s not really a good show. It is a show with minimal entertainment value. If it had a character as reckless as Amos Moses, the show might just be 100 percent, or 15 percent, better. Funny though, I used to think Jerry Reed was singing about Doc Milsap and his pretty wife Hanna raising up his son to eat up his weight in gophers. Later, I realized the word was “groceries.” Either way, it would be kind of comical for someone who could eat up his weight in gophers. Maybe someone like that is just what Swamp People needs.