Leaving Alaska for love
“Here in Kodiak, Alaska, it’s dark six months of the year,” a woman narrates over frosty video footage. “There’s only one grocery store. We survive by living off the land.
“If you want to eat it, you gotta kill it.”
Oh, how we immediately feel for the burdened cast members of TLC’s Alaskan Women Looking for Love (9 p.m. Sundays), which debuted last week. They’re not just on a quest for mere companionship as the title suggests, but for basic survival, too!
Wait, if the area is so uncultivated, how can two cast members be identified as waitresses? There must be one restaurant somewhere. And we know there’s at least one bar, as the cast was filmed shooting pool and liquor there.
So maybe Alaska is not as primitive as Alaskan Women Looking for Love producers inconsistently purport. Still, as a cast member says, “It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s windy and it’s an interesting place to be a woman.” And that’s because while men outnumber women, they’re of the coarse Discovery Channel ilk (think Deadliest Catch and Alaska: The Last Frontier). Not to mention, they all seem to have borrowed bushy beards from the prop room of another basic cable show: A&E’s Duck Dynasty.
This show follows six flannel-shirt-wearing women in their 20s and 30s who are about to take a life-changing trip, one explains: “So my friends and I are getting our frost-bitten butts in gear and heading down south to sunny Miami. We’re on a mission to meet the men of our dreams. To see and do things we’ve never imagined.”
Things like — yow! — bikini waxing, indicate previews.
There’s Sabina, a 27-year-old waitress who was born in Russia. Hey, that means she could see Alaskan Sarah Palin from her house!
There’s Heather, a 29-year-old single mom who has to explain to her son about leaving to go on a reality dating show: “I would never choose to do anything that was not also in the interest of us as a family!” You mean like leaving your son to go on a reality dating show?
There’s Haley, a 21-year-old tattoo enthusiast. Yes, there’s at least one tattoo artist in limited Kodiak (although maybe not the most skilled one, judging by her ink kitties and bunnies) — Haley’s ex-boyfriend.
There’s Tina, a 32-year-old welder who offers this deepvoiced fear about Miami men: “I’m probably going to be, like, more tougher, like, than some of the guys down there, I think.” Or all guys everywhere, we think.
There’s Jenny, and where to begin with Jenny? Pregnant for the first time at age 13, she’s a single mother of three who had been a youth ministry leader with her former husband of 17 years, a minister, before he fell out of love and they divorced. Jenny says, “So, I am single and free now!” Well,
except for those three kids, and for her mother who follows her to a bar and begs her to come home.
And there’s Lacy, a 22-year-old who works for her family’s fishing charter/ lodge business. She says, “It will be nice to just be in a new place, new atmosphere, where everybody doesn’t know everybody and if I do something wrong or embarrassing, not everyone in the whole town is going to know what I did.” No, now everyone in the whole world is going to know.
Will the women find love this season? Previews show they do at least find the beach, bathing suits, jet skis, night clubs, pole dancing class, drag shows and drama.
And they find a lot of hooch, which Jenny drinks straight from the bottle, giving new meaning to “baked Alaska.”