As technology continues to make life ostensibly more convenient, there is an opposite movement afoot. People are abandoning the niceties of the modern world - the sky-scraping apartments of the city, the homogeneous McMansions of the suburbs - for something decidedly much wilder. Like modern day pioneers, they're building new lives off the grid in places like Alaska and Montana, constructing their own homes, harvesting and hunting their own food and raising their families in a self-reliant fashion.
This burgeoning back-to-nature lifestyle is the subject of several popular TV programs, like "Building Alaska," which follows folks attempting to build cabins without the help of roads or building supply stores, "Living Big Sky," which chronicles couples' search for new homes in the expanses of Montana, and "Tiny House Big Living," which brings downsizing to a new level when clients move into homes that average 180 square feet.
Denver-based Orion Entertainment produces these shows as well as others like "Mega Decks" and "The Treehouse Guys" for networks including HGTV, DIY, Travel Channel, Discovery and Outdoor. Chris Dorsey, the Wisconsin-raised CEO of Orion who makes his home outside of Denver, recently spoke with Headlines & Global News about the back-to-nature movement, the popularity of "Building Alaska," which recently started its seventh season and has a new episode airing Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST on DIY, and the evolution of the American Dream.
In the intro to "Building Alaska," the voiceover says, "For generations, the most courageous have ventured into the unknown," and in "Living Big Sky," we hear, "It just may be the last of the West." Are these people the modern version of the pioneers? Is there a kind of renewal of the American frontier spirit at work here?
I think that frontier spirit might have been a little bit dormant for a while, but I think it's coming back, and I think you're seeing that again with people doing that kind of stuff. They're shunning the corner office jobs that pay significant six figures for a very different quality of life and that sense of self-reliance. When you can do something tangible, when you can build a structure to live in, when you can chop wood and grow a garden and hunt deer for meat and catch a fish for food, there's a satisfaction that's primal, I think, in our DNA, and I think that's part of why some of these shows, like "Building Alaska," when you see somebody who can strike off into the wilderness, cut down trees, strip those trees, make an amazing log structure along the riverbed that's got three salmon runs, native trout and other species, hunt the moose for food and survive through a grueling winter, you marvel at that. I think when you live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and you look at somebody who can still do that, they might as well live on the moon. It's not foreign as much as it almost seems alien.
"Building Alaska" has been particularly successful and just started its seventh season. Why has that show performed so well?
I think there's building, and then there's building in Alaska, and the twain are so different. It's relatable in that there's a lot of folks that like to build things, whether it's a doghouse or fixing up their kitchen, and then when they measure their challenges against what builders in Alaska go through, I think there's just sort of a shock and awe. And the character of Alaska becomes the biggest character in the series. It's the weather, it's the bears, it's the seismic activity, it's the earthquakes that are ever present, the forest fires that are ever-present, and all those challenges that people are up against. But then you see the emotion in their faces about wanting a piece of the wild and what they're willing to go through to not observe nature but be a part of it. This isn't swilling a cocktail on a cruise trip as they go by the icebergs, this is a full-on immersion of Alaska, and I think that's fairly rare. You don't see a lot of that.
But I think it's not just extreme and dangerous, like I'm going to catch crabs at the bottom of the ocean, which is gritty and amazing and all that, this tends to be more on the relatable side, like gosh, wouldn't it be amazing to wake up and see Denali as your view every day? Imagine a moose walking through the front yard or being able to walk off the dock and catch a salmon and smoke that salmon and eat it for dinner. It calls people, it speaks to people, and it's really developed a loyal following.
Has the American dream - the house in the suburbs, the white picket fence - changed?
Yeah, without question. I think the American dream is evolving, and it's evolving to a degree out of necessity but also because of a change in worldview from segments of the population. Millennials don't share the same dream that boomers had, and that's really no surprise. We've got these shows like "Tiny House Big Living" which we do on HGTV which has been really successful for them that has really tapped into this movement. There's an enormous underground movement of two different age segments, millennials and retirees. It's unusual to find a concept embraced by those two segments. These are folks that say look, I don't want to be saddled with a mortgage, I want to be mobile, I want to move around, and I want to have freedom and I want to be self-reliant. A lot of these folks are all about solar energy and building green and just leaving a very small footprint on the planet, and it's their personal manifesto and that's how they believe they'll be happiest. They're minimalists. I think you're seeing a lot of people doing that, and simplicity means happiness for a lot of folks.
So we're seeing that in a lot of different ways, and I think getting out and about, when somebody lives in a tiny house or they have a big deck like our "Mega Decks" series or they have treehouses like our treehouse series, what that is is the baseline is people wanting to engage with the outdoors in the same way, wanting to be connected to nature in some way, which seems unusual when you're talking about someone building a half-million-dollar deck, but why wouldn't they just build a half-million-dollar house, or a bigger house? They want the experience of the outdoors, they want glass instead of walls, and they want fire, and they want water and they want to feel air, they want the seasonal aspect of being able to take that glass out and being able to connect with the wind and to hear the thunder and to taste the rain coming in before it arrives. Those are all things that are very real. There's also an enormous self-reliance movement underway in the country, and these aren't just doomsday preppers, these are people that want to live on the land and by the land and be self-reliant without worrying about whether or not the grid is going to be here tomorrow, whether or not their food supply is toxic. They want to grow their own food, they want to harvest their own food, they want to know their kids are eating things that aren't full of steroids and antibiotics and hormones and things that they really don't know the long-term implications of, although we've got all sorts of ailments in our society that didn't exist 20, 30 year ago; certainly some of those are environmental, there's no question. And it's women and it's men, so it's not just one or the other. In fact, we're seeing an awful lot of women as folks that are really taking charge of the household when it comes to their family's health and their well-being. So it's very fascinating how it's manifested in so many different changes in lifestyle and worldview and defining happiness, so that's been fun to be a part of it.
How did you initially connect with, B'fer the colorful main character on "The Treehouse Guys"?
B'fer is the oldest kid I know. He's so much fun. I don't care if that guy was 120 years old, he'd still be the most likable kid in the room. He started this deal by saying I always wanted a treehouse as a kid but I never had one. So it's almost like this is his therapy to build these things. He's a super fun character, they're a great team, they're very talented and I think those shows that work the best - and the show does very well - are the ones that have the big heart, when there's a really amazing motivation. Grandad is surprising grandkids and that sort of connection is always fun. Maybe it's to build something for a terminally ill child. He's just one of those guys. The instant you watch him, you like him.
How dangerous is it to film some of these shows?
It can be tricky. We did as series called "Guiding Alaska" which will be upcoming this summer on Travel Channel, which was really fascinating, because it's about Tikchik Narrows Lodge, which is a really premium lodge in Bristol Bay Alaska, which is the world's richest salmon fishery. People pay to go up there, and every day you're flying out on bush planes to go different places to fish and catch salmon and look at the bears and camp overnight in some cases, and the weather is tough and bush flying is extremely dangerous. So it comes with the territory. Moving around in watercraft and aircraft and fixed-wing and choppers and that type of thing, and being in bear country on a regular basis, takes the right kind of crew. You don't send somebody who's shooting an MTV show typically into those environments, you're going to find the right guys who thrive on it, and fortunately we have. We have a lot of those here in Colorado because that's kind of what they do when they're not working, they're up in the mountains and biking and camping, so you find those types that thrive in that environment.
Does Orion have any other shows of this nature in the works?
We've got this amazing couple, we're doing a series for DIY ["Jon and Etta go off the Grid"], he's an ex-military guy and she's an ex-Victoria's Secret runway model who's a horse trainer as well, so they're in the middle of nowhere in Montana, homesteading. It's like Adam and Eve. They've got this beautiful little child and they're young and really attractive folks, and you feel like they've gone to the Garden of Eden and we're starting over again. They're going to raise bison, and she chases off a black bear that was going to get the livestock. They've got wolves, they've got grizzlies. The dark of night brings visitors, the four-footed kind, in a really interesting you're-not-necessarily-on-top-of-the-food-chain kind of way, and just all that you're going through to get water and power off the grid and to grow food and defend that food.
We're doing one also on Outdoor Channel which is a new one called "Alaska's Wild Gourmet," which is also fairly interesting in that we have this guy who is 29 or 30 years old who is a classically trained Cordon Bleu chef, and he caters to the wilds of Alaska. So when there's fishing camps or hunting camps or snowmobile races or something, they hire him to come in with his family and they put on these gourmet meals using food sourced from the wilds of Alaska: salmon, moose meat, bear meat, foraging for all sorts of various plants and clams and mussels. They trade and barter and he's just a super loud, fun character. We discovered these guys when we were doing the "Kodiak" series on Discovery.
How does the lifestyle of your family mirror the back-to-nature movement?
We live on wild game. I hunt and I fish a lot, as much as I can. I'm one of those strange TV execs; I don't hang out in cocktail bars with other execs and producers, I usually go to hunting clubs and farms, and those are the folks that I hang out with. Ice fisherman, you talk about a fun bunch. I've been a hunter and a fisherman from a young age, I love the activity, and we live on it. My kids are a part of it and they love it, my wife is a great cook and prepares that kind of stuff. We're starting to raise or own chickens and we're going to put in a big garden for the first time. We're not afraid of anything, it's just a fun process, and you know what? All of these activities engage the whole family, and how many things do you do anymore that engage the whole family?
