Here is a good read on the pair............
http://www.thehawkeye.com/print/Lakosky-033008
SALEM -- Just outside this sleepy little hamlet in southeast Iowa, in a two-story pole building that's house on one end and equipment shed on the other, live a pair of accidental TV stars.
When Lee and Tiffany Lakosky moved from Minnesota in 2003, it was never with the idea of developing a reality hunting show that would one day become one of the most-watched outdoor programs on television.
"It's not just the typical hunting show," Lee said.
The opening sequence of the first episode of "Scent-Lok's Gettin' Close with Lee and Tiffany" hints at that, showing the couple flirting and smooching, rather than hunting.
Moments later, following a video montage of locations around their adopted hometown of Salem, the show's opening song -- with the line "life is good, life is fine" running throughout -- shifts to footage of the couple in a variety of settings, including celebrations of a kill.
Having grown up in Minnesota, Lee first hunted in Iowa in the late 1990s, starting in the southwest corner of the state and eventually coming east toward Centerville.
Then, in 2002, came the real estate tip that eventually would thrust southeast Iowa into the limelight of outdoor TV, with the suggestion made to Lee by someone who knew someone who had 280 acres of hunting ground for sale outside Salem. At the time, they already had land in Kansas, and since then the property has grown to 800 acres, though it makes up less than a third of the couple's land holdings in Henry and Van Buren counties.
In 2003, the building they first expected to be a hunting cabin was built.
"We live in a barn," Lee said.
"But a very nice barn," Tiffany added.
At the time they moved, a TV show was a possibility but hardly a guarantee. Lee quit his job at a Minnesota refinery simply because he wanted to live in Iowa, where he could hunt their promising new land and either get work as an outdoor writer or go back to engineering.
As it was, two weeks after the move, the couple wound up signing on with Scent-Lok to do their TV show.
The Lakoskys met when both were living in Columbia Heights, Minn., outside the Twin Cities, and Tiffany started hanging around with Lee's younger sister in elementary school. Nine years older than her, Lee was in high school at the time and hardly thinking he'd just been introduced to his future wife.
"He used to ignore me back then," she said.
Later, however, when he was in graduate school, working toward a master's degree in chemical engineering and she in college, the two became a couple.
It was then that Tiffany first got into hunting. Lee, a near lifelong hunter who shot his first squirrel with a BB gun when he was 5 (it was another 10 years till he got his first deer), was working at an archery shop, and Tiffany would go see him there. When he suggested she get a bow, she started out shooting on the range at the shop and eventually got to be a pretty good shot.
"I think I was pretty much hooked since then," Tiffany said.
Early on, even though she could shoot with bow and arrow, when Tiffany accompanied Lee on hunting expeditions, she never hunted. But then, when she finally did take her bow into the field, it took the then-23-year-old just an hour to make her first kill, an 8-point buck.
"She was so excited," Lee remembered.
At that time, being regulars on TV and having their own show was not even on radar.
"This all came about by accident, really," said Lee, whose freelance work for some hunting magazines marked the first step on the path to stardom.
The articles he wrote earned him an invitation as a member of the media to the 2000 Archery Trade Association show in Indianapolis. There, he met people from camouflage hunting products company Realtree who were responsible for that company's top-selling hunting DVDs, new titles of which Lee said he had for years looked forward to like a kid on Christmas morning waiting for Santa.
Common interests led to a friendly relationship, as well as a business one that had Lee contracting to use Realtree products. Lee and Tiffany also were invited to film their hunts for inclusion on Realtree DVDs.
For three years the couple appeared on hunting DVDs for that company and others.
"We were getting a lot of attention," Lee said.
The presence of a woman as a central part of the hunt was uncommon, and was a formula seen as a way to bring women into the audience.
Of their suitors, two had an agenda related to marketing products. Scent-Lok, which already had a successful show on the Outdoor Channel where it promoted its hunting gear, was looking to do something different with its second.
Unlike other shows in the genre, the program isn't simply about stalking prey, making a kill or selling the sponsor's products. Tiffany, who set aside her career as a flight attendant to do the TV thing, said she and Lee were given "free reign to do whatever we wanted to do."
What has developed is a show that is at least as much about its stars and their relationship as it is about hunting.
"It's more about what a good time we have," Lee said. "By the end, somebody takes a good one."
In January, "Gettin' Close" became the highest-rated show in Outdoor Channel history, and with 1.7 million viewers a month is among the most-watched outdoor shows on any network.
On the first episode of their show, a turkey hunt in Oregon, the couple had to brave airport security in Cedar Rapids and a creek turned raging river by melting mountain snow before reaching a blind where Tiffany got the show's first kill.
So far in three seasons, the couple has hunted turkey, duck, moose, deer, caribou, antelope, bear, carp and alligators in places ranging from Alberta, Canada, to Louisiana to Kansas and Florida.
"Right now we could go wherever we want to," Lee said.
Future hunts are planned in the Yukon Territory of Canada, New Zealand and Africa, all in one year. Those will air during season five, starting in 2009.
Though not exclusively the location for their hunts, the Lakoskys' rural Salem home is the setting for most episodes, including the hunts, as well scripted segments and promotional spots for the show's various sponsors.
In particular, most of their whitetail hunts are recorded close to home, where their land is managed to attract and keep big deer with big racks. All together, about 400 of their 3,000 acres is planted in dozens of food plots. There are feeders, too.
On Lee and Tiffany's land, deer that other hunters might see and shoot are passed by for future years.
"When we shoot a deer, we've already got its history," Lee said, through observation, trail camera pictures and collections of shed antlers.
While they are working on an episode, as many as five cameras are rolling at once and frequently just one, typically from dawn till dusk. Sometimes they have a crew, other times, one hunts and the other shoots video. During the off season, the couple stays busy with TV commercials, magazine photo shoots, filling feeders, picking up shed antlers, managing their land and planting food plots.
Between hunting, shooting scripted scenes and attending trade shows, the Lakoskys had just one weekend off in 2007. There's plenty of farm work to manage the land for deer, too.
"There's no down time," Lee said. "Down time is hunting season."
As for the show, the first and second seasons are available now on DVD while the third comes out this spring. The fourth season starts with new shows July 1, featuring hunts from the past year.
Looking to the future, Lee and Tiffany say there is precedent for a long run, pointing to a variety of hunting and fishing shows that have been on TV for many years.
So long as they continue to create quality shows, Lee said, there is no end in sight for "Gettin' Close."
However long the show lasts, the Lakoskys have found a home in southeast Iowa. Tiffany's mother Linda recently moved to the area, and for as much time as they spend at home, they have made a few friends and enjoy what the area has to offer.
Which is what exactly?
"Good people and good deer," Lee said. "It's a good combination."
http://www.thehawkeye.com/print/Lakosky-033008
SALEM -- Just outside this sleepy little hamlet in southeast Iowa, in a two-story pole building that's house on one end and equipment shed on the other, live a pair of accidental TV stars.
When Lee and Tiffany Lakosky moved from Minnesota in 2003, it was never with the idea of developing a reality hunting show that would one day become one of the most-watched outdoor programs on television.
"It's not just the typical hunting show," Lee said.
The opening sequence of the first episode of "Scent-Lok's Gettin' Close with Lee and Tiffany" hints at that, showing the couple flirting and smooching, rather than hunting.
Moments later, following a video montage of locations around their adopted hometown of Salem, the show's opening song -- with the line "life is good, life is fine" running throughout -- shifts to footage of the couple in a variety of settings, including celebrations of a kill.
Having grown up in Minnesota, Lee first hunted in Iowa in the late 1990s, starting in the southwest corner of the state and eventually coming east toward Centerville.
Then, in 2002, came the real estate tip that eventually would thrust southeast Iowa into the limelight of outdoor TV, with the suggestion made to Lee by someone who knew someone who had 280 acres of hunting ground for sale outside Salem. At the time, they already had land in Kansas, and since then the property has grown to 800 acres, though it makes up less than a third of the couple's land holdings in Henry and Van Buren counties.
In 2003, the building they first expected to be a hunting cabin was built.
"We live in a barn," Lee said.
"But a very nice barn," Tiffany added.
At the time they moved, a TV show was a possibility but hardly a guarantee. Lee quit his job at a Minnesota refinery simply because he wanted to live in Iowa, where he could hunt their promising new land and either get work as an outdoor writer or go back to engineering.
As it was, two weeks after the move, the couple wound up signing on with Scent-Lok to do their TV show.
The Lakoskys met when both were living in Columbia Heights, Minn., outside the Twin Cities, and Tiffany started hanging around with Lee's younger sister in elementary school. Nine years older than her, Lee was in high school at the time and hardly thinking he'd just been introduced to his future wife.
"He used to ignore me back then," she said.
Later, however, when he was in graduate school, working toward a master's degree in chemical engineering and she in college, the two became a couple.
It was then that Tiffany first got into hunting. Lee, a near lifelong hunter who shot his first squirrel with a BB gun when he was 5 (it was another 10 years till he got his first deer), was working at an archery shop, and Tiffany would go see him there. When he suggested she get a bow, she started out shooting on the range at the shop and eventually got to be a pretty good shot.
"I think I was pretty much hooked since then," Tiffany said.
Early on, even though she could shoot with bow and arrow, when Tiffany accompanied Lee on hunting expeditions, she never hunted. But then, when she finally did take her bow into the field, it took the then-23-year-old just an hour to make her first kill, an 8-point buck.
"She was so excited," Lee remembered.
At that time, being regulars on TV and having their own show was not even on radar.
"This all came about by accident, really," said Lee, whose freelance work for some hunting magazines marked the first step on the path to stardom.
The articles he wrote earned him an invitation as a member of the media to the 2000 Archery Trade Association show in Indianapolis. There, he met people from camouflage hunting products company Realtree who were responsible for that company's top-selling hunting DVDs, new titles of which Lee said he had for years looked forward to like a kid on Christmas morning waiting for Santa.
Common interests led to a friendly relationship, as well as a business one that had Lee contracting to use Realtree products. Lee and Tiffany also were invited to film their hunts for inclusion on Realtree DVDs.
For three years the couple appeared on hunting DVDs for that company and others.
"We were getting a lot of attention," Lee said.
The presence of a woman as a central part of the hunt was uncommon, and was a formula seen as a way to bring women into the audience.
Of their suitors, two had an agenda related to marketing products. Scent-Lok, which already had a successful show on the Outdoor Channel where it promoted its hunting gear, was looking to do something different with its second.
Unlike other shows in the genre, the program isn't simply about stalking prey, making a kill or selling the sponsor's products. Tiffany, who set aside her career as a flight attendant to do the TV thing, said she and Lee were given "free reign to do whatever we wanted to do."
What has developed is a show that is at least as much about its stars and their relationship as it is about hunting.
"It's more about what a good time we have," Lee said. "By the end, somebody takes a good one."
In January, "Gettin' Close" became the highest-rated show in Outdoor Channel history, and with 1.7 million viewers a month is among the most-watched outdoor shows on any network.
On the first episode of their show, a turkey hunt in Oregon, the couple had to brave airport security in Cedar Rapids and a creek turned raging river by melting mountain snow before reaching a blind where Tiffany got the show's first kill.
So far in three seasons, the couple has hunted turkey, duck, moose, deer, caribou, antelope, bear, carp and alligators in places ranging from Alberta, Canada, to Louisiana to Kansas and Florida.
"Right now we could go wherever we want to," Lee said.
Future hunts are planned in the Yukon Territory of Canada, New Zealand and Africa, all in one year. Those will air during season five, starting in 2009.
Though not exclusively the location for their hunts, the Lakoskys' rural Salem home is the setting for most episodes, including the hunts, as well scripted segments and promotional spots for the show's various sponsors.
In particular, most of their whitetail hunts are recorded close to home, where their land is managed to attract and keep big deer with big racks. All together, about 400 of their 3,000 acres is planted in dozens of food plots. There are feeders, too.
On Lee and Tiffany's land, deer that other hunters might see and shoot are passed by for future years.
"When we shoot a deer, we've already got its history," Lee said, through observation, trail camera pictures and collections of shed antlers.
While they are working on an episode, as many as five cameras are rolling at once and frequently just one, typically from dawn till dusk. Sometimes they have a crew, other times, one hunts and the other shoots video. During the off season, the couple stays busy with TV commercials, magazine photo shoots, filling feeders, picking up shed antlers, managing their land and planting food plots.
Between hunting, shooting scripted scenes and attending trade shows, the Lakoskys had just one weekend off in 2007. There's plenty of farm work to manage the land for deer, too.
"There's no down time," Lee said. "Down time is hunting season."
As for the show, the first and second seasons are available now on DVD while the third comes out this spring. The fourth season starts with new shows July 1, featuring hunts from the past year.
Looking to the future, Lee and Tiffany say there is precedent for a long run, pointing to a variety of hunting and fishing shows that have been on TV for many years.
So long as they continue to create quality shows, Lee said, there is no end in sight for "Gettin' Close."
However long the show lasts, the Lakoskys have found a home in southeast Iowa. Tiffany's mother Linda recently moved to the area, and for as much time as they spend at home, they have made a few friends and enjoy what the area has to offer.
Which is what exactly?
"Good people and good deer," Lee said. "It's a good combination."
