Men’s Journal Features Tristan Bayer: The New TV Guides

(Read a printable version here.)

THE NEW TV GUIDES:

TV loves adventure, so it makes sense that a crop of daring frontmen now host their own shows. These charismatic travelers search for endangered species, witness world records, tame wild beasts and boot contestants off islands.

Tristan Bayer

Animal Planet, Caught in the Moment

In 1996 Bayer’s father, Wolfgang, sold his entire 16mm film library — 35 years of the legendary wildlife filmmaker’s work measuring more than one million feet — and flew his family around the world to film sights like polar bears and migrating butterflies. Heart problems slowed Wolfgang after two years, and Tristan, a 21-year-old Jackson Hole native who followed his old man around East Africa as a two-year-old camera toter, took the helm. The project quickly morphed as Bayer put his family in the film. The result, 2005′s Earthling, earned critical success and led to his big television break, Animal Planet’s Caught in the Moment. Teamed with childhood friend Vanessa Garnick, Bayer roams the planet searching for rare or disappearing species in the name of conservation. “I want to have an impact,” he says. “Maybe synergize everything into a happy, green moment.” It’s not always happy; Caught often captures the cohosts screwing up and squabbling. But it also shows them rendered speechless, their wonder shining through as they film Madagascar’s lemurs, British Columbia’s spirit bears, or California condors feeding off a gray whale, a scene that hadn’t been recorded since Lewis and Clark’s expedition in 1806.

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