Fish Tank Kings

The Fish Tank Kings are back on Nat Geo Wild for more exceptional aquarium designs and customers with oddball requests to challenge them.

First off, let me get this out of the way... while I enjoy some aspects of these sorts of reality shows, I absolutely loathe the false drama. A show like this is never going to air a sequence leading to total failure and customer disappointment. It would be bad for business. So when they show them having trouble getting a tank through a doorway and cut to a solo interview, probably filmed much later, of one guy saying "It didn't fit in the door! I don't know if we are going to be able to do this!" Of course it will fit, or another solution will be found, because if it didn't they wouldn't air it. This manufactured drama is the reason I can't really sit down and just enjoy a show like this. I have to have a laptop or tablet or smartphone in my hands so I can distract myself with other things.

On the other hand, I am very interested in the design and construction of the aquariums that the Fish Tank Kings (Living Color in southern Florida) come up with and implement. So while I have to look away from the screen when they cut away to the lame interviews, I am glued to the screen when they show them molding the tanks, constructing structures, building ponds, and more. And the reveals of the final products are almost always stunning.

The upcoming season promises to be more of the same from season one, where they turned a VW bus into a fish tank. The episodes I watched for review had:

• A man who wanted a shark tank in his office and conference room - as in a tank that goes through a wall and extends into two rooms for dramatic effect. And all on the second floor of a building.
• A restaurant owner who wants a special tank for his restaurant, and demands that there be no coral or colors.
• Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan wants to build an oasis in his desert dog rehabilitatin and person training facility.

Of the three, that last one in the desert was my favorite. And while those are the main stories, every episode has a "B" story of a smaller, yet still impressive, installation - like an octopus tank at a zoo.

If you can get past the annoying fake drama, Fish Tank Kings is an excellent show about amazing aquariums and how they get built. Definitely worth watching if you are into that sort of thing.