Streaming Pick Of The Day: 'Dark Tourist'

One of the lessons Netflix has learned over the years about original content is that while familiar brand names are important, many viewers are just fine with TV shows and movies that seem familiar. Especially if they are produced at the same level as what you'd expect to see from a traditional American production.

That programming philosophy has been especially apparent in the reality and documentary TV genre. At one time you could find plenty of television programs that had originally aired on reality stalwarts like A&E, Food, Travel, and HGTV. But those deals ultimately won't renewed and according to people I spoke with at the time at Netflix, one of the reasons was that while viewers liked the idea of the shows being available for streaming, the terms of the deals didn't make sense for Netflix. It's not that viewers wouldn't watch episodes of "Good Eats" or "The Wahlburgers." It's that those shows weren't anyone's first choice and that makes the shows less valuable to Netflix. It was also incredibly difficult to get global rights for the shows, whose rights were already sold-off in a lot of major international markets.

The answer for Netflix was to go with a mix of licensing lesser-known international reality programs and original productions and co-productions that resembled familiar TV shows. And the latest entry in the latter category is "Dark Tourist," which premieres globally Friday on Netflix.

The series is hosted by New Zealand's David Farrier, who travels the world seeking out the strangest and most dangerous tourism experiences he can find. Episode one centers on South and Central America and it includes some really bizarre narco-tourism tours, including a taxi driver who impersonates drug lord Pablo Escobar while driving and simultaneously shouting threats into a 1990s-style walkie-talkie ("If he doesn't have a dog, I'll buy him one, let him fall in love with the dog and THEN kill it!").

The eight episodes of season one follow Farrier as he travels the world doing everything from swimming in a lake in Kazakhstan that was formed by a nuclear explosion to hanging out with white separatists in South Africa. Each adventure is stranger than the last and the amazing thing to me is how many people seem happy to spend some of the hard-earned vacation time cleaning corpses in Indonesia or attending a voodoo festival in Benin.

"Dark Tourist" will feel familiar to anyone who watches the Travel Channel, although Farrier brings a lot more wry humor and life to the show than you would normally find in an American production. And his presence in the show is one of the interesting things about the show and how it ended up on Netflix.

While Farrier is from New Zealand, the show wasn't picked up from a TV network there. Instead, Netflix ordered the show from him after seeing a documentary called "Tickled" that Farrier had produced several years ago thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. That project focused on the uniquely American sport of "competitive endurance tickling," which involves participants wearing sports apparel while tickling their restrained subjects. That documentary turned out to be a proof of concept for "Dark Tourist," which takes the idea and expands it for an international audience.

"Dark Tourist" is a blast to watch. Farrier is just the right amount of charm and snark & no matter how much travel programming you've watched, I guarantee you'll see plenty of unfamiliar things that make you shout "What the heck are these people thinking?"