Day 11 of the 🌨️ 13 Days of Recommended Holiday Reality TV ✨
11. The Last Alaskans
The holiday magic
Animal Planet said ► “the daily rituals of four families choosing to live in seclusion, vast distances from each other as they overcome harsh arctic conditions, frustrating setbacks, and aggressive wildlife while they survive in one of the last great unspoiled and unforgiving wildernesses on the planet”
why I recommend it ► a peaceful, beautiful show that’s especially resonant in winter
where to watch ►
free: Plex • Discovery.com
subscription: Hulu • HBO Max • Philo • Discovery+
Why you should watch
The Last Alaksans’ first season followed four families who live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They occupy four of the seven remaining permitted cabins, and the series allows us to be part of their lives in a way that’s difficult to describe but easy to experience.
What drew me in initially is how visually spectacular the series is, with shots, filmed with drones, that are almost unimaginable. It’s entrancing.
This isn’t style for the sake of style, though. What’s on the screen just conveys what this life is like: deliberate, thoughtful, calm. There are slow motion shots, and frequent long, extended takes of the landscape and people. There is no rush here, no need to feed short attention spans.
The score, credited to Figure and Groove, has piano and percussion, but is mostly just ethereal sounds that enhance the visuals.
It’s quiet and peaceful; slow and gorgeous.
The Last Alaskans is somehow even quiet in moments of tension—a tiny plane nearly crashing as it lands, heading straight for a camera operator, who drops the camera; a gun jamming when a man attempts to shoot a caribou.
There’s kind of a storyline but not a heavy-handed narrative; it’s more like a series of vignettes of life.
Some moments, usually someone reflecting on events of their lives, are devastatingly sad. “That’s what I miss in the world today. Love,” Bob Harte says, talking about his loneliness. (Bob died in 2017, and the show addressed it in a very moving way.)
Heimo and Edna Korth, previously the subjects of a Vice documentary, lost their oldest daughter when she was two: their boat capsized and she drowned, and her body was never found. The series illustrates their pain and their continuing connection to the land.
What they share is a world I just want to settle into and keep watching, perhaps because I’m too attached to comfort to be able to attempt the lives that these people lead—and because The Last Alaskans is a masterful achievement in television.
✨ 13 Days of Holiday Reality TV ✨
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