How The Last Alaskans Got Made — and What's Coming Up in Season Two

Photo: Discovery Communications

One of the best surprises of the summer has been Animal Planet's hypnotic documentary serial The Last Alaskans. The show follows 4 families who live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska — the last families legally allowed to reside there. They alive extremely remotely, not even well-nigh one another, and the evidence follows both the boggling wilderness weather and the relative mundanity of their twenty-four hour period-to-day routines. The footage is incredible, the subjects hugely compelling. In that location's none of that reality-show shtick to the serial either that phoniness. Instead, the stories within whatever given episode are about what compels people to live unusual lives, about what "domicile" might experience similar, and what constitutes isolation. The bear witness's season finale arrogance Sunday, and Vulture has an exclusive clip, of Tyler and Ashley Selden trying to find the cabin that Tyler rebuilt over the summertime:

Animal Planet has renewed the show for a second season, and then nosotros spoke with its executive producer Keith Hoffman to inquire some lingering questions nearly how the distinctive series came to be.

Hoffman says the show had "a lot of dissimilar starts," just things actually began to come together a little over a year ago. Heimo Korth, who, along with his wife Edna, is ane of the show's main subjects, is something of a legend, and his cousin wrote a volume about him a few years agone."People have been trying to practise shows with Heimo for a long fourth dimension," Hoffman says. "There'due south a thousand Alaska shows," Hoffman says. "We really wanted to practise something authentic. Once we convinced Heimo of that, information technology was easier to become anybody else." That said, not every family who lives in the Refuge participated. "A few are a little more interested at present, just nosotros feel we want to go deeper with our four families [for season two]," Hoffman says.

Flavor one of the show goes pretty deep, though, and function of that is because of how much time the crew spent with each family unit. Three-member crews were embedded with each family, though they weren't always covering all 4 places at once. "Basically, it's really expensive — you're not just driving somewhere," Hoffman explains. While the subjects themselves live in cabins, crew members lived in tents nearby, even in -50 degree atmospheric condition. "Those cabins tin can't exist used for commercial utilize. They would get in one time or twice during the year for a communal meal, out of bonding and respect, only [the coiffure] had to stay exterior."

The show filmed August through January, with a few more weeks of filming later in the wintertime — and that's role of why the show feels so languid. "It's not like we're going out for a calendar week, so nosotros needsomething to happen," Hoffman says. Some of the testify's nearly hitting moments current of air up being cinematographic rather than story-driven, cheers to drone cameras capturing the staggering vastness of the surroundings and GoPro cameras capturing some of the wildlife segments. (There'due south an underwater shot of a fish biting a worm off a hook that's especially memorable. Hoffman says that was filmed with a GoPro.)

And nevertheless for all the sweeping vistas and poignant monologues, maybe the most riveting moment of the series isn't on film at all. Bob Harte, a bearded and unassuming guy in his 60s, is wistful and sage on the show but he'south also, for lack of a meliorate term, unbelievably hard-cadre. He crashed his tiny seaplane and was stranded in the wilderness for four days with no way to contact anyone, and no ane was even aware that he'd left. He describes the ordeal on photographic camera — largely unfazed — but the subjects don't movie themselves. Hoffman says it's a possibility for next season, though. "I recall people could forgive if it didn't look quite as good [every bit footage shot past crew members] because it'd be real."

That's the beauty of the show, the romance of it; I'm not in a position to asses if information technology isexistent, simply it certainly feels and seems existent. We see Ray Lewis, his married woman Cindy, and his three virtually-adult daughters (the oldest is 21), and the Lewises and Harte speak a lot virtually how important it is to hunt big game, to kill a moose or a caribou. It's a point repeated on several episodes. And notwithstanding … no moose. No caribou. It merely doesn't happen. We see a lot of trap-setting and fishing, and there'due south a lot of candid discussion well-nigh the urgency of hunting. The Lewis sisters are very matter-of-fact about information technology, having grown up with that as a normal part of their lives, only the Seldens — the youngest and least experienced of the families — show more trepidation. There's a poignant scene of Tyler killing a lynx with a snare trap. It's non sport and it's not gratis, only it is something you don't encounter on television set very often. "Nosotros're Animal Planet, so you're non gonna go to us to watch a hunting show," Hoffman admits, "but we didn't want to shy away from it."

As for adjacent flavor, Hoffman says to await generally more of the same. Maybe we'll meet more than of the subjects' families (Harte speaks very tenderly of his ex-wife, for instance, and the Korths have adult children who don't live in the Refuge); maybe it'll encompass more of the basic information (similar what bathing options are bachelor); perchance we'll run into more of the shopping and planning necessary for a winter in the wilderness. Hoffman confesses that he was a piffling nervous when thinking about what a whole other flavour of the show would entail: Was there really more story there? Would things showtime to feel repetitive? But at present that preproduction is gearing upward, he's non worried. "Life changes all the time — any of our lives alter from i twelvemonth to the adjacent, and theirs do, too."

How The Last Alaskans Got Made