Sarah Palin's Alaska: The Gosselin Episode

[Re-posted from earlier today]

I did my duty. My rough notes:

No animal was killed this week, which is a little shocking. Yes, they did manage to scare Kate Gosselin with Todd's deadpan about the living room rug bear - "Sarah's dad shot that one a couple years back". But the only equivalent of ripping out a fresh halibut's heart and holding it still beating in your pale tween hands was the Gosselin kids playing with the plastic fake tongue of the dead  bear.

I have to say the more I see of Chuck Heath, Sarah's 450px-Bear_warning_signdad, the more he seems like the real thing. The revelation of the episode was his little shed full of astonishing artefacts of wildlife, small and large, that he joyfully shared with the kids. He stole the entire show, captivating the children like an iconic granddad from the wild, and he is obviously an educated, smart, curious man. How on earth did he produce an intellectually inert brat like his daughter?

The obvious creaking conceit of the latest show is that Sarah is the mama grizzly and that Kate is the suburban wuss. This conceit was not so hard to pull off as, say, Track's becoming worthy of his dad in one salmon run. But it kinda failed anyway. The camping scene was so horribly dreary and rain-soaked and obviously bone-chilling that although Mrs Gosselin was a whiny loser, you almost felt sorry for her. Sarah Palin's outdoorsy schtick would also be more convincing if she didn't look so perfectly made up and coiffed the whole time. C'mon. And that cheesy incessant cheer-leading about making a fire in the pouring rain - you just want her to shut up for a second. There is no sight she doesn't have to narrate, no event she doesn't have to explain, no moment she doesn't fill with some kind of draining uplift.

And how many gays are there in Alaska? Last week, we came across a very practical gal in the frozen dark tundra who represented a vision of feminist Alaska that couldn't quite read the Breaking News on Fox. And this week, I swear there was a big, cheerful, bearded bear teaching Kate and Sarah how to handle ... bears. No, I didn't hallucinate it - you can catch him in this video clip. He even made a bear in-joke, I think.

You think to yourself: there's a bear teaching two divas about bears on a reality show. This has to be Bravo.