Review: 'Expedition Bigfoot'

If it's hard to find a good man (or woman), that search is apparently infinitely easier than the one to find Bigfoot.

Until the last 15 years or so, the search for Bigfoot was limited to a few people who had devoted their lives to walking around remote forests looking for size 22 footprints and a subculture of Bigfoot enthusiasts who went to talks presented by people who had claimed to have had an encounter with the big hairy one.

But with the growth of cable television came the Bigfoot television shows and there have been a lot of them. Finding Bigfoot ran 12 seasons and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that they didn't find him (or her).

And then there are the more open-minded series such as Mountain Monsters, which spent six seasons looking not just for Bigfoot, but for other Appalachian-related creatures, ranging from the "Lizard Demon of Wood County" to the "Kentucky Hellhound." Somewhat surprisingly, none of those creatures was captured, killed or even recorded by a cellphone camera.

It's true that I am not a Bigfoot believer, but it's not as if I wouldn't like to be convinced. Finding a living specimen of such a creature would literally be a find of the century, especially given the encroachment of civilization into the formerly wild woods. But despite the fact that there have been probably as many Bigfoot-related hours of television produced as there has been for all of the events of World War II, the fact that nothing concrete has been found leads me to suspect that all of these Bigfoot television efforts might be sincere, but that doesn't make them any less a waste of time.

If you feel the same way about the search for the mythical hairy one, your mind will not be changed by the season premiere of Expedition Bigfoot, which kicks off its third season Sunday on the Travel Channel.

The show follows a team of four people who have been combing the woods of Oregon and Washington in search of Bigfoot. Each episode also includes an appearance by some local, who talks about some encounter they had with a creature they believe was Bigfoot.

The first two seasons included a lot of flashy maps and some scientific gear, but most of the "evidence" they collected fell into the familiar Bigfoot evidence categories of random big footprints, weird hair samples and moaning/screeching sounds from somewhere off in the distance. There were also plenty of references to what the area's native population believe about Bigfoot and a lot of theories that seemed unlikely at best. My favorite being that Bigfoot is known to be able to influence electronic devices, which is why no one has been able to take a clear photo of the creature.

Season three begins with a plan to have a repurposed agriculture drone filled with a special mixture of primate pheromone fly over the area, and spray the payload into the in hopes of speaking a reaction. Think of it as the Bigfoot television genre's reaction to introducing a new divorcee into the mix of any random Housewives series.

You will be shocked to learn that the idea didn't get the response they expected, although there were a few random unexplained noises heard during the experiment. Although even the team admits that spraying the equivalent of primate Viagra over a forest filled with hungry bears might lead to some hard to predict results.

Expedition Bigfoot isn't the dumbest show of the genre and the participants at least refrain from saying some of the goofier things you hear on other shows, such as "The woods smells Sqatchy tonight." So I suppose if you really must watch a fruitless hunt for Bigfoot, then this is the show to watch? Although that feels as if I am setting the bar very, very low when it comes to television recommendations.