“You have a weird thing for Canadian melodrama, my friend.”

Do you have some form of digital cable? Do you get the Science Channel? Have you seen the glory that is … Mantracker?

My wife Cairine (why yes, she was named after the first woman senator in Canada!) doesn’t work on Thursdays and she discovered Mantracker on her most recent weekday-at-home. She could not wait to tell me about it and insisted that I had to watch it as soon as possible. We were both home on Labor Day, and we realized that our cable provider had four episodes available in the on-demand library. So I can now report on the show first-hand, instead of relying on Cairine’s account (which, by her own admission, sounded at certain points like something she might have dreamed about).

Here’s the basics: it’s a Canadian reality show/game show, where each week two contestants have to try to get from random point A in the Great White North’s Unspoiled Wilderness to random point B, usually covering a distance of about 40 km (the metric system! Isn’t that adorable?), before they get caught by the Mantracker, an old cowboy from Alberta named Terry Grant. (Why am I even telling you his name? I’m just going to call him Mantracker for the rest of the post. I guess I just want to make the point that the contestants change from week to week, as does the Mantracker’s sidekick, but the Mantracker is always the same singular dude, it’s not just a title. Anyway.) Advantages given to the contestants (the show calls them “prey”, which is … unsettling): a map of the area, knowledge of exactly where point B is, and a head start. Advantages given to the Mantracker: a sidekick with local knowledge, a horse, and the fact that he is the fuckin’ Mantracker.


I like this picture of the Mantracker because it captures his might and majesty in one of his signature moves: poking dirt with a twig.

There are a million reasons why this show shouldn’t work, but let me speak to just one. The premise kind of falls apart on closer examination, as you realize that both Mantracker and sidekick and the contestants are being followed by camera crews. Maybe two young, buff firefighters (to use the example of the one episode I saw) can outrun two cowboys on horseback by clambering through deadfalls at top speed, even with heavy backpacks on their shoulders (the chase takes two days and the contestants camp out overnight) but Video Guy and Sound Guy and their equipment? My armchair guess is not so much.

OK, so then maybe Cairine and I are just really easily amused because the show totally works for us, though probably for slightly different reasons. Cairine loves Canada, and was in fact thrilled to find out earlier this year that she is eligible for Canadian citizenship because her mother was born in Ontario and some other complicated parliamentary reasons. Cairine is always trying to convince me that we should move to Canada, which I think she sees as some kind of socialist paradise where women get a year’s paid maternity leave and no one’s commute is longer than ten minutes, and only that long if your elk-drawn sleigh has to stop to let a family of otters cross. I remain skeptical. I am definitely glad that we live in a world that has a Canada in it, don’t get me wrong, I just want to leave the living-in-Canada to Canadians. They’re the experts.

So Mantracker lets Cairine enjoy the Canadian vistas (the establishing shots really are pretty magnificent) and the thrill of the chase (even if it is of the contrived, heavily edited, reality show type). I enjoy the way the show reinforces stereotypes about the Canadian national character; to wit, that they are all unfailingly polite. The show hits all the standard reality competition beats, including the contestants directly addressing the camera beforehand to discuss their strategy. In America this is where we would do the, how you say, “trash talking”. Apparently the Canadian thing to do is talk about how much you respect the Mantracker and how you’re just going to try hard and hope for the best. Even better is the moment at the end of the show where Mantracker catches one of the contestants. Between the contestant congratulating and praising the Mantracker for winning the chase, and Mantracker even-handedly praising and congratulating the contestant for eluding capture as long as he did, there was so much bonhomie that it almost disqualifies Mantracker from the whole reality genre as we know it.

Did I mention there’s no prize at stake for the contestants? No cash, no sponsor-provided ATVs, just the satisfaction of accomplishment. This might be the strongest argument yet that Canada really is a socialist paradise, very Star Trek United Federation of Planets “we’ve moved BEYOND money” kind of utopia. (In other words, crazy.)

The main thing Cairine and I agree on, of course, is that the Mantracker himself is a total bad-ass. When he gets off his horse and pokes the dirt with a twig and points out one quarter of a bootprint and announces that he knows which direction the contestants are headed and how long ago they passed through, he’s like a western paperback character come to life. It actually doesn’t matter if the pursuit is legit or totally staged, because Mantracker has an aura of authenticity that you just want to believe in. You can try to cover your tracks but Mantracker will see the tracks you didn’t even know you were leaving and he will hunt you down and that shit is FOR REALS.

I strongly suspect I’ll be watching Mantracker again. I poked around a little online and found there are a couple of different kinds of episodes. Some are like the one I saw, with earnestly competent contestants like the two firefighter buddies. Others apparently have a bit more psychodrama to them because the contestants are a romantic couple who, invariably, crack under the pressure of the chase and bicker self-destructively. Of course in Canada “bicker” probably means “become slightly less supportive” but it sounds a little closer to the televised trainwrecks I know and love, so I’ll have to check out that variation for the full range of Mantracker experience.