He’s an icon around Lake Winnebago, because for more than thirty years, Don Herman’s company has helped to pull hundreds of vehicles from the lake after they’ve fallen through the ice. And now that lifestyle could be turned into a reality TV show.
Don Herman is the expert when it comes to Lake Winnebago ice conditions. He has decades of experience to prove it. So when a reality TV show producer called Herman and expressed an interest in doing a show on his business, Sunk? Dive and Ice Service, and what happens around the lake in the wintertime, Herman was not interested.
“I said yeah, whatever! And I hung up,” recalls Herman. “I thought it was fake.”
But persistence paid off for producer Jay Russell who finally got Herman to agree to participate. Russell truly believes the Lake Winnebago ice fishing sub-culture is something America would love to see.
“We feel like it’s something that is different,” says Jay Russell from ACR Productions. “I mean one of the big positives is you don’t have shows, reality TV shows from this geographical area. There’s none on there because it just hasn’t been found.”
So, since April, Russell has been working with Herman and a cast of characters to produce a trailer that will be shown to network executives with hopes to sign a deal for a reality TV show. It’s a vision that Russell says actually has potential of being picked up.
He says, “Everybody seemed to really like it, you know, that it was different. It was dangerous, it was high stakes, that kind of thing.”
And for herman it’s helped to breathe new life into his decades old career.
Says Herman, “I said I was going to retire, but it kind of gave me a boost of energy now.”
A boost that will get bigger if the show is picked up, something that could happen by early next year.
Source: WBAY.com
