If you don’t happen to be a fan of either reruns or soccer, the pickings on TV at the moment are pretty thin.  We watched last week’s Formula 1 race in Austria, and we’ll be watching the one in Britain this coming weekend. Obviously we’ll be watching the matches where the U.S. is playing, but if you can’t figure out what a soccer off-sides is, and if you don’t have any skin in the game, watching all of them is … well … pretty pointless.  

So what have we been doing instead?  Streaming two diametrically opposed series—Downton Abbey on Peacock and Homestead Rescue on HBO-Max. The two shows couldn’t be more different.

Homestead Rescue features the Raney family—father, Marty, son, Matt, and daughter, Misty.  They do more than just talk the talk.  They also walk the walk.  For the past forty-plus years the family has lived on homesteads located in the wilds of Alaska.  Each year those three members of the family travel around the U.S. and Canada, too, helping other homesteaders whose dreams of living a self-sustaining liveseoff the grid are headed to certain disaster.  Regardless of weather or other obstacles, the Raneys allow themselves exactly seven days to work their homesteading magic on each property.

When Bill first started watching episodes of that years ago, I thought everybody involved was … well … nuts. It seemed to me that many of the people who had decided to homestead had done so without the slightest idea of how to go about it, and it seemed to me that if the Raneys thought they could work miracles with those folks, they were as crazy as the people they were trying to help.  But gradually the whole idea grew on me.  Marty is the infrastructure guy.  He’s all for saving falling-down barns, fixing impassable roadways, building bridges and dams where necessary, and making sure each family has a supply of potable water and/or access to electricity.

Son Matt is the protein provider.  He makes sure livestock is safe, warm, and protected from predators.  In the South where wild boars are a problem, he helps homesteaders learn to turn the enemy into a food source.  Depending on where the homestead is located, he also teaches families how to hunt and process deer and fish.  As for Misty?  She’s the garden guru.  She builds green houses and gardens where fruits and vegetables can grow and thrive in any weather or landscape, from treacherous Alaska freezes to the high and low desert temperatures of Arizona, New Mexico and Montana.  

We had watched the series hit and miss for years, as new episodes and old ones showed up on network TV, but this is the first time we’ve watched the entire series, and now I find it downright inspirational.  Marty is absolutely fearless.  He pilots massive pieces of heavy equipment as though they’re ordinary tractors.  He uses them to build roadways in seemingly impossible terrain and to dig down deep enough to tap into springs that can provide water for homesteads that were previously dry as dust.  Matt teaches homesteaders that if they’re going to be self-sufficient, they need to have structures that keep their livestock warm and safe from predators, but that you also need to know how to process them to provide food.  As for Misty?  She shows people how a properly built green house can grow vegetables in an underground garden carved into a desert hillside or in a greenhouse in Alaska when it’s snowing outside.  

Now that we’re watching the entire series in order, we’ve seen how the family carved a road up an impossible cliff to build their own homestead dream house only to have it burn to the ground a year or two later.  In that case, we saw one of the homesteaders the Raneys were helping, comforting Marty when he broke down in tears from losing his own home.  And I’m fascinated by what Marty calls “Homestead Hacks.”  In one case, a small ranch in Arizona had a well with water in it, but the windmill wasn’t strong enough to pump it up to the surface. Marty took the windmill down, welded additions onto the windmill’s fans, and up came the water.  When he was trying to make adobe bricks in New Mexico in the winter, it wasn’t working because the water in the wet cement would freeze and crumble the bricks before they dried.  What did he do?  He added anti-freeze to the mix. 

Often, when a family needs help and there aren’t enough hands to get the job done, other homestead families, ones the Raneys helped in the past, turn up to help out. And don’t think the Raneys just look after the homesteads. They also look out for the people involved.  In one case, the husband at a homestead two hours from the nearest medical facility suffered from serious seizures.  The road between where they lived and the hospital was often blocked by fallen trees.  The wife was terrified of using a chain saw, but Matt patiently taught her how to start one and cut the tree into small enough pieces that she could push them out of the way.  

Misty often teaches the mothers and daughters involved how to make use of power tools.  In the case of a homestead overrun with tumbleweeds, she turned tumble weeds into something like hay bales and used them as the bottom of a raised vegetable garden.

One of my mother’s favorite saying was “God helps those who help themselves.”  If Evie had ever a chance to watch Homestead Rescue, she might have revised that to say, “God and the Raneys help those who help themselves.”

Okay, I get it.  If you’re still reading, I’ve now gone on ATL about Homestead Rescue.  (By the way, in our household, ATL stands for AT TEDIOUS LENGTH and means you’ve said too damned much!) When I started writing this, I had no idea about how much I was going to have to say.  It looks to me as though this is already too long, so I’m afraid my review of Downton Abbey will have to wait. 

As they used to say at the end of those old-time radio programs, “See you next week. Same time, same station.”