Iolan George Wyant and his buddy Tim Saylor of National Geographic Channel “Diggers” fame, added another level of exposure this month.
Netflix, the online movie and TV network, began airing their show last week. With more than 75 million subscribers, Netflix will provide about one-third of the 66 episodes that have aired over the past four years.
Meanwhile, Wyant is unsure of the future of “Diggers,” which has he and Saylor discovering relics and coins of historical significance. “We’ll know more in a couple of months,” he said. If National Geographic doesn’t renew, “we hope to land a deal with another channel,” Wyant said, or maybe “have our own show on YouTube.”
Both remain busy through a contract they have with Garrett, a Garland, Texas, manufacturer of metal detectors and accessories. They were in Las Vegas earlier this year at a trade show on behalf of the company, and have dates in Virginia (twice), Europe, Canada and perhaps Australia late this year.
“‘Diggers’ is really popular in Europe,” Wyant said. “If you find something 500 years old and get excited about it, they laugh at you in Europe. They think of old as 1,000 years.”
IF “DIGGERS” sounds like a fun way to make a living, it is, Wyant said. But allowed it’s also hard work.
Their schedule has them shooting three or four episodes in succession, often hunting from daylight to dark with little more than a lunch break.
Usually, one week’s work produces a 22-minute episode.
Viewers “see us dig up a lot neat things, but they don’t see the thousands of holes we dig” that aren’t productive, Wyant said. Each episode also has a theme usually attached to a person with historical significance. Occasionally what is found alters the script.
Take Bugs Moran, for instance.
“We were digging in the yard by his house in Chicago and I found a buffalo nickel (minted from 1913 to 1938) which led to a script change,” he said. Legend has it Moran tossed a buffalo nickel on the chest of whomever he killed, saying “He wasn’t worth a nickel.”
Finding Steve Job’s time capsule after his death in 2011 was among the more interesting episodes, Wyant allowed. The capsule was found near where it was supposed to be in Colorado, but the area had changed because of construction and led to a fair amount of searching. “It even had his first mouse in it that he showed at an international design conference,” he recalled.
That episode is on Netflix, as well ones dealing with Lincoln’s assassination, Wyatt Earp, Blackbeard’s treasure, Poncho Villa and a Nazi fighter plane that crashed in Indiana.
Indiana? “Yeah, it had been captured and was being flown so we could learn some of the Nazi’s secrets,” Wyant said, who found a part from the plane’s cockpit.
