Fight Quest

Year: 2008
Network: Discovery Channel
Featuring: Jimmy Smith and Doug Anderson

The name of this show sounds like the title of a terrible Jean Claude Van Damme film. The plot would be something involving a series of competitions with stereotypical, culturally insentive enemies, and the final fight would involve shards of glass and take place on top of a slowly revolving platform in an empty-but-still-functional warehouse. Lucky for us, Fight Quest doesn’t involve Muscles from Brussels or plots involving airplanes and explosions. Though it does involve martial arts in far flung land.

The first season now on the Discovery Channel, Fight Quest follows Jimmy and Doug, as they travel around the globe, visit cultures with a deep tradition of martial arts, train, spar and compete. The conceit of the show is that these two men have five days to train with experts of each martial art, after which they take place in a small scale competition to prove their mettle. Not surprisingly, considering the short amount of time that they have to train, neither Jimmy nor Doug dominates in any realm, but it’s amazing to see how each fighter uses their strengths and which of the two is most tuned to a given style.

Fight Quest is part travel show, part Martial Arts fighting event. You can learn a lot about the people of a land, just by seeing the way that they train. The relentless, quiet training of the Japanese, the artistic flow of French savate, the brutal quickness of Pencak Silat.

It’s strange, in these days of mixed martial arts and hybrid forms, that the pure artistry of these specific martial arts forms are celebrated. You can see how each of these forms have their roots in self-defense, and at the same time, just how many holes they have if they were to be used in anything outside of the confines of the sport.

As clumsy as Jimmy and Doug can appear while doing something completely foreign to them, you get the sense that given their ability to use and combine different forms and their very American MMA training, that they would be able to dominate almost every practitioner that they come across in a no holds-barred environment (except for maybe the Brazilians).

But that’s not what this show is about- who’s best in a fight. It’s about two Americans learning the traditional arts of different cultures and doing their best. Fight Quest may not feature the best of fight competitions or the most in-depth of travelogues, but for anyone interested in fighting, traveling, or fighting while traveling, it’s a compelling show.

In these days of slowed down fictional TV shows, reality and documentary TV may be the only bastion of true entertainment. I mean, what else are you going to watch? More Rock of Love 2?

TV Grade: B+

Fight Quest at the Discovery Channel Website