Previewing Alpha Dogs

If you happen to wonder what I do with my free time, it is mostly spent thinking of possible Hollywood reboots like Turner and Hooch with Steve Stiffler filling in for Tom Hanks, Ramona Flowers as the vet love interest and Carl Winslow would naturally get promoted to chief (surprisingly no studio executives have hired me as a consultant for their reboot departments yet). Despite all the time I have devoted to resurrecting the dog cop classic, I never gave much thought about how you train a K-9 unit.

That is until I saw Alpha Dogs which premieres this Friday at 9:00 on Nat Geo Wild. The new series follows the trainers at Vohne Liche Kennels located in Indiana, one of the largest K-9 kennels in the world which provides law assisting pups to local police, SWAT teams, border patrol, and every branch of the military, including some outfits us average citizens are not privy to. They even have top security clearances and some of the people they train to use their dogs have to have their faces blocked out “for national security reasons”. The team teaches handlers and dogs to leap from helicopters, rappel down buildings, search buildings and cars for explosives and drugs, and chase down human targets. The dogs can even be trained to find illicit cell phones in prison cells and money being brought through airports as part of laundering schemes.

The show, brought to you be Jack Osborne (before you scratch your head, if I am not mistaken, Jack starred in a misguided celebrity police show that also took place in Indiana so he obviously made some connections), is full of a couple characters that you would expect on a show like this, really anyone willing to play a bad guy decoy for dogs or hang out with live explosives is probably going to be an interesting person (or just really hard up for cash). These are the type of people where you are going to see more mullets than sleeves and go turtling in their down time. If you want to know what turtling is, you will have to tune in to find out. I will give you a hint by saying it is something you will never see me doing.

Alpha Dogs airs Friday at 9:00 on Nat Geo Wild with back to back episodes.