Empathetic viewing bonanza for armchair treasure hunters

“CURSE of Oak Island”

Armchair treasure hunters are having a field day this season, watching quite a number of shows designed to fill their hunger for empathetically finding a king’s ransom worth of gold, jewels, old coins, shipwrecks laden with priceless ceramics, etc.

The viewers themselves may not get rich, but the rush they get from empathetically unearthing all that treasure has its psychic rewards!

On “Gold Rush,” the action has been expanded to cover gold mining and sluicing expedition in three different parts of the world, with the three teams competing with each other to see who goes home with more profitable booty and bounty.

The expeditions are now high-tech and expensive propositions that use a lot of manpower and sluicing machines to go through tons of gold-bearing ore in only a few weeks’ time.

This is a big departure from the simpler family efforts of old, but the huge jump in earnings makes it all worth it for the lucky and savvy teams that do strike it rich.

As for the losers, the huge investment entailed wipes them out—but that’s the luck  of the gold-mining game!

Another TV show involving a treasure hunt, “The Curse of Oak Island,” is even more ornate and expensive in its game plan, with its financier in possession of an old map that indicates a location of a secret cache of pirate’s  treasure.

Frustratingly however, the cache has been secreted deep in the belly of an uninhabited island, and is “defended” by a complex  arrangement of barriers and dead-end twists and turns!

But, the treasure hunters forge on despite many frustrations and scary discoveries—like the remains of a precursor who perished before reaching the prized cache.

Adding to the current explorer’s increasing stress is the very real possibility that the fabled treasure is just that—a fable—or they have been effectively sidetracked by the complicated defense system put up around it, and they are looking in the wrong place!

This being a TV show, however, we expect that, at the end of the exceedingly long and expensive search, the treasure hunters will indeed finally find their fortune—or else, the viewers won’t forgive them for “wasting” their precious time!

Other “armchair” treasure hunts on TV include “Gem Hunt,” a show that follows venturesome traders who deal in precious gems, as they travel to remote parts of the world to buy “raw” rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

Other related searches include “Rebel Gold,” “Bering Sea Gold,” “Lost Treasure Hunters,”  “Jungle Gold,” “Silver Rush,” “Shipwreck Men,” “Deep Sea Detectives,” “The Sea Hunters” and “The Dirt”—an empathetic viewing bonanza for armchair treasure hunters—and dreamers!