The Wild Within has officially become my new favorite (currently airing) television show.  The Travel Channel has found a real gem in Steve Rinella. The Wild Within is the one show currently on the air that has me eagerly awaiting each and every new episode all week long… and at the end of each episode I find myself nearly depressed that the episode is over and I am forced to wait yet another week to watch the next. It is the series that already has me wishing it was available on iTunes so I could share it with my friends and watch each and every episode at will. The Wild Within is my new Dual Survival (as I anxiously await the beginning of Dual Survival Season 2. By the way, rumor has it that Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival Season 2 begins in late April or early May of this year!).

So why am I so taken with The Wild Within? The Wild Within is the perfect mixture of the outdoors, self-sustenance, survivalism, getting in touch with your inner primitive man and your inner philosopher. It calls irresistibly to the “renaissance man” in each of us. The Wild Within is the quintessential show for those of us who tend not to take the world around them for granted. In a societal generation teetering on general emasculation, Steven Rinella, the star of The Wild Within, is a rare beacon of independence, honesty, toughness, and rawness.  Rinella gives his audience something they are hungry for but frequently denied call masculinity, reminding his audience what it truly means to be a man.

Rinella, both an accomplished writer and an avid outdoorsman, has authored two books (The Scavenger’s Guide To Haute Cuisine and American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon) and has written for an array of publications including Outside, New York Times, Glamour, Trapper, and Predator Caller, the New Yorker, Bowhunter, Men's Journal, Flyfisherman, The Week, Salon.com, O the Oprah Magazine, and the anthologies Best American Travel Writing and Best Food Writing.

Rinella is a native of Twin Lake, Michigan and has made the outdoors his playground since early childhood, but Rinella currently resides in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Katie and his very young (less than a year old) son Jim. This is where it gets interesting. While the Rinella family resides in a classically urban Brooklyn apartment, Steve has chosen to provide food for his family the way most of our ancestors did: by “living off the land”.  Steve travels the country to various hunting and fishing grounds to sustain his family with wild game and fish that he catches himself and ships back to his New York apartment. In the pilot episode we watch as Steve pulls prawns, caviar and crab from the icy waters of Alaska and then hunts for black tail deer on a mountain adjacent to his cozy Alaskan fishing and hunting cabin.

For those of us who love asking questions like, “How did mankind get to where we are today?”, and “What would happen if that were all to change over night?”… this is just the show for people like us. So many of us presumptuously flick a light switch or chuck a cellophane-wrapped animal part into a steel cart without giving any thought to what challenges our ancestors overcame to afford their families such luxuries. We are so ensconced in our modern “hustle and bustle” world that we give absolutely no thought to its fragility or what would happen if something were to disrupt this fragile balance entirely. What would you do if you flicked that switch and no light resulted? What if that plastic-wrapped meat mysteriously stopped replenishing itself? What would you do?

Rinella imparts an unprecedented vantage point to his audience by allowing us to ride “shotgun” as he takes us on a host of adventures into the “wild”, each of which give us an up-close and personal look into his lifestyle and personal philosophy. Rinella’s mission seems to be one of reminding us when and where and we came from and then rekindle a desire within us to return to those roots and stay in touch with them. For example, nearly all of us utilize fire in one form or another on a daily basis (cooking, heating water, driving our car), yet very few of us know how to create fire without a lighter or a match! In the same token we

The Wild Within is a series of beautifully assembled presentations of many qualities including honesty, courage, determination, toughness, responsibility, beauty, brutality, and morality. The show also pays as a healthy dose of homage to the “wilderness” itself, the creatures that call it home, and those in the past and present who perpetuate this relationship with nature refusing to lose touch with the traditions from which we all came. It is both amazingly raw yet wonderfully refined at the same time. I am always taken with how Steve can be up to his elbows in blood and entrails and simultaneously eloquent about the relationship he has with the beast whose life he has just concluded.

If a truly unique perspective combining getting in touch with your primitive self, spending time in the outdoors, survival, self-sustenance, history and tradition interests you, then the Wild Within should be just the show for you! This is currently the show that earned a status of “protected” on my DVR!