Disappointing 'Redneck' TV Shortchanges The American South


Skipper Bivens of Animal Planet's Hillbilly Handfishin'.
Oklahoma hand fisherman Skipper Bivins is obviously a man who enjoys his work.

Bivins is the star of Animal Planet's Hillbilly Handfishin', a so-called reality TV show that turns on a few handy stereotypes about rural, white working-class people from the South.

Let's call it, for lack of a better term, redneck TV. And you can find it well beyond Animal Planet. Over on A&E, American Hoggers centers on the Campbell Family and their business: hunting down feral hogs in Texas. Patriarch Jerry Dean Campbell seems cut from a Rooster Cogburn movie â€" an ex-Texas Ranger with a sidearm and battered cowboy hat, who will tell you he's been "hunting wild boar since the 1960s."

More than anything, these series feed an odd sort of racial stereotype. The subjects are hard-partying, not particularly intellectual and connected to the land in ways we Yankees can only guess. They're real-life descendants of the Dukes of Hazzard who wave around the rebel flag and embrace the term "redneck" as a badge of honor.

Which explains the titles for some of these shows: CMT's My Big Redneck Wedding and Redneck Riviera, a show gathering buzz as a southern-fried Jersey Shore.