News article: They Make Nice Neighbors (and Good Belts)

Location, location, location, they say in real estate, but timing is important too. And the timing of the house hunters in Destination Americaâs new real-estate show, âBuying the Bayou,â couldnât be worse. They are settling into their freshly purchased waterside getaways just as mutant alligators are marching out of the swamp with blue tongues, spike-shooting tails and really bad tempers.

John Chriss in "Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators."

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A cabin on a lake in Louisiana, in "Buying the Bayou," on Destination America.

Ritchie Montgomery, left, and Christopher Berry in "Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators."

One of the mutant reptiles in "Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators."

Yes, this has turned into an impromptu Gator Week on television, what with the Destination America show, which begins on Saturday night; real-life news segments out of Mississippi about alligator-hunting season; and a shocking documentary â er, I mean, trashy creature feature â on Syfy on Thursday night, called âRaginâ Cajun Redneck Gators.â

In July, the Syfy movie âSharknadoâ posited that tornadoes could suck sharks out of the water and cause them to rain down on greater Los Angeles, and âRaginâ Cajun Redneck Gatorsâ is at least as plausible. A bayou father and son, foolishly tinkering with the ancient family recipe, make a few undrinkable barrels of moonshine, electric blue in color, and decide to get rid of them by dumping them into the bayou.

âThe swamp is tough,â the father advises when his son expresses concern that their disposal method might not be environmentally friendly. âItâll take about anything you throw at it.â

This rationale, popular for decades among those who preferred to make industrial waste disappear by pouring it into rivers and oceans, proves to be somewhat flawed because giant alligators are soon emerging from the swamp. Their tongues are a telltale blue, and their tails have spikes, which they can shoot like arrows with a mere flick, impaling any humans in the neighborhood.

Also, if one of the beasts bites you, you will soon turn into a mutant alligator yourself. Without giving too much away, this leads to a scene in which a young actress named Jordan Hinson has the unenviable job of staring a gator in the eye and with a straight face saying, âDaddy?â

The three outdoors-loving men in the premiere of âBuying the Bayouâ were no doubt unaware of any of these developments in alligator evolution as they were shopping for a riverside hunting camp in Columbia, La. âGotta be a bunch of gators,â one of them says as the episode begins, describing the main attribute they are looking for in a property. Because these guys like to hunt alligators.

The show is a cousin to âBuying Alaska,â another Destination America series, in which people are seen shopping for out-of-the-way properties in Alaska. âBuying the Bayouâ presents house-hunting tales from Florida to Texas, but no one is looking for a palatial Southern mansion. These buyers want to be in the swamps, and having a skinning rack in the yard is more important than having drinkable running water.

Alligators are mentioned about every two minutes in this show, often in a hunting context. And real life has had a fair amount of alligator hunting in it as well in the past few days. In Mississippi, where alligator-hunting season began last weekend, one group set a record by killing a male alligator that weighed just over 723 pounds, only to see that record broken soon after by a 727-pound kill.

Video clips of these achievements have been all over television and YouTube, adding to the alligator wrestling and such already familiar from Animal Planetâs âGator Boysâ and other backwoods reality shows. Human opinion on alligator hunting varies, but alligator opinion is almost certainly unanimous, and all of this television coverage must seem to these animals like taunting. Bad moonshine isnât the only thing that gets dumped into the bayou. As environmental groups well know, trash of all sorts is thrown into swamps, and it presumably includes a fair number of old televisions. Any mutant alligators using these discarded sets to watch the gator-bashing will certainly be more inclined than ever to flash their blue tongues and sharpen their tail spikes.

In a later episode of âBuying the Bayouâ a house-hunting couple who envision boating fun with their children on a river near Slidell, La., ask a real estate agent about water-skiing safety.

âWhen youâre skiing, the gators tend to go away,â the agent says. âTheyâre more scared of you than you are of them.â

Maybe that was true of premutant gators, but itâs certainly not true now. Water skiing? Are you kidding me? It may seem like recreation to a human, but to a mutant gator with a spiked tail and a TV, it just looks like target practice.
What are the most important parts of this news article?
Alligators are popular this week, with âRaginâ Cajun Redneck Gatorsâ and âBuying the Bayouâ offering both fact and fiction about the reptiles.