The musician and actor John Lurie had a brief reality show of sorts in 1992, Fishing with John, that seems like at first a fishing show with celebrity guests, but turns out to have a kind of weird sense of humor, where the narrator overdramatizes mundane moments with big music and jumpy editing (like John Lurie and Jim Jarmusch “catching” a shark and making it look like Jaws), and it gets sillier. There’s an episode where John and Willem Dafoe are ice-fishing in Maine in a makeshift hut, and the story arc makes it seem like as if they were stuck there for a week before dying of malnutrition and starvation, then the next episode (where John is in Thailand with Dennis Hopper), the narrator is like “I was wrong! John is alive!”
It’s a weird and funny show, with behind the scenes facts like Tom Waits hating their fishing trip on this rust bucket of a boat in Jamaica and reportedly not talking to John for two years, or Matt Dillon looking straight off of filming Singles and just looking confused and out of his element, as John Lurie wanted Flea but the producers didn’t think he was enough of a big name to have on the show.
The theme song is very Twin Peaks-esque. John Lurie had a sequel of sorts last year with HBO’s Painting with John, as he shifted his focus to being a painter after being diagnosed with Lyme disease in the 90s.
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