Out Da’ Bayou, Discovered

When we got him on the phone in mid-February, John Jackson and his co-host Robin Vucinovich, the duo behind locally produced outdoor lifestyle show Out Da’ Bayou, were driving back from Springfield, Louisiana, where they’d spent the day “knee-deep in alligators” at C&M Gator Farm. This was their fifth trip out to C&M because, as Jackson explained, the story of this family business is so diverse, there’s just no way to do justice to it in less. This time they’d been up in C&M’s helicopter visiting alligator nesting sites, and would be adding the footage to material from earlier visits, which had focused on aspects of the gator-farming business, from egg collection, to harvest, hide preparation, the release of young gators back to the wild, and C&M owner Chris Wall’s sideline business dirt track racing. Yes, Jackson admitted, five days of shooting, plus twice that many in the editing suite, is a lot of work to put into one thirty-minute outdoor TV show. But when that show is going out to a potential audience of 94 million households on the Discovery Channel, it pays to be thorough.

Gators, helicopters … it’s just another day not at the office for Jackson and Vucinovich, whose week had also included trips to coastal Plaquemines parish, and the LSU AgCenter’s Food Incubator in pursuit of stories for Out Da’ Bayou, the documentary-style outdoor show Jackson launched in 2013. Before that, Jackson spent fifteen years shooting LSU sports and producing outdoor shows for other people. “But I felt like we were missing the stories of the people,” he said, “that special breed of people who do this for a living and survive off these unique Louisiana resources.” Like most home-grown things, Out Da’ Bayou started small, airing locally on WAFB Channel 9 and New Orleans’ Cox Sports TV. But unlike most shows that air across the Discovery Channel’s international network, Jackson and Vucinovich’s show has stayed that way. “Most shows this size have a staff of fifteen to twenty,” Jackson, who grew up in Clinton, Louisiana, pointed out. “We have two. We write, shoot, edit, and color every second of every show.”

After four years of episodes, Jackson says that Out Da’ Bayou is far from running out of Louisiana outdoors subject matter. Sticking to a documentary-style format, the show will spend the day on an oyster boat, or a crab boat, providing viewers a window into not only the origins of seafood that they love, but also an introduction to the folks who make their living catching it. Jackson explained that, of all the subjects the show covers, fishing is most popular, “…because there’s such a huge diversity of species here,” he said. “There’s no other place where you can catch a bass and a billfish in the same day, from the same boat. I’d put our fishing way before anywhere else I’ve ever been on the planet.”

Episodes of Out Da’ Bayou air on Saturdays at 6:30 am on the Discovery Channel network, and locally on WBRZ Channel 2. Or stream it from Discovery Channel’s website or app. For more visit OutDaBayouTV.com.

This article originally appeared in our March 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.