Because I’m a fan of TLC’s array of trainwreck shows, it was kind of a lock that I was going to watch Risking it All. Long story short, the premise of the show is three families (the Kemps, Watfords and Elliotts) that decide to begin lives anew “off the grid.”
Quotations, because of loose interpretations of what living off the grid really means.
Sounds like a recipe for more TLC goodness, right?
Forget the notion that the impetus behind the families’ starts with the breadwinners of each respective families losing their jobs, so the logical next step would be to go off the grid. That’s basically like saying I lost my job, and instead of doing what other people do, which is to look for another job, deciding that I was going to uproot my family and go move into the woods.
No, the reason I call the show a crock is because none of these families are really living off the grid.
The Kemps are probably the most well-adjusted family with the least amount of baggage. Their family unit functions well, without a lot of angst or drama, but the fact of the matter is that they live “off-grid” as much as the Atlanta Braves will be playing “in Atlanta” when they move. Now all three families have essentially done the same thing, buying large plots of presumably abandoned land, that comes with whatever existing structures were on it, conceivably functional at one point, but it’s not like they packed their shit and went into the woods.
But the Kemps, as much effort as they’re putting into it, and moving into the woods, the fact of the matter is that they’re never more than a mile away from an actual paved road that has cars traveling on it occasionally, that takes them into civilization (as much as Sparta, North Carolina can be called civilized). And when it came time for them to lay down foundation for their “off-grid” home, the first thing that happened was a delivery truck delivering lumber to their property. You read that correctly – a truck delivered wood to a family to build their home in the woods, where they are surrounded by wood.
So off the grid.
The Watfords are much of the same thing; they have an existing structure that they all shack out in, but the kicker was what’s seen in the picture above – when they needed a chicken coop to wrangle their livestock, they didn’t build one, as much as it would be assumed for those people supposedly living “off the grid,” but they had one delivered to them.
Yeah, real off the grid.
And then the Elliotts, kind of a hippie family from Kansas, moves to Oregon, for the frail wife’s health reasons. Same story, but all off-grid credibility goes out the window when Blake, the patriarch of the family, fires up the solar-powered generator and then dad and his three daughters are suddenly all in front of laptops, tethering their cell phones in order to get internet access.
But they’re outside, so it’s clearly off the grid.
Can’t we just have a show that follows Cody Lundin around or something? At least we know for fact that he lives off the grid, legitimately.
