New TV - "Gator Boys" and "American Stuffers" - NYTimes.com Sierra Anderson, left, and Dean Anderson in "Hook, Line & Sisiters," on TLC. There was a time when it was considered high entertainment - in novels, on the stage and at the movies - for a pretty young woman to be tied to a railroad track and left in imminent danger of decapitation by an oncoming train. You might think we've outgrown such stuff here in the age of universal suffrage and women's rugby; the frail-sex-in-jeopardy gimmick seems a bit retrograde. But not on Backwoods TV. That's the genre of reality television that presents plain-spoken, often scruffy people performing unconventional jobs involving animals: catching wild hogs, removing raccoons from attics and so on. Three new entries in the field are very different in many ways, but each includes a young woman trying to break into a male-dominated world and men who treat them as if they were mentally and physically unfit to do so. Listen closely to any of these shows, and you can hear the train whistle. On "Gator Boys," which has its premiere Sunday on Animal Planet (though a teaser episode has already been shown), Paul Bedard and Jimmy Riffle run an alligator-trapping business in Florida that a cute volunteer named Ashley wants to learn, but they would rather she just clean up gator droppings. On "American Stuffers," another Animal Planet show that makes its debut on Thursday, a significant subplot at Daniel Ross's XTreme Taxidermy shop in Arkansas is whether Dixie, the new intern, will be able to look at animal guts without vomiting. And on "Hook, Line & Sisters," a series that TLC rolled out last week about a family with a fishing business in Alaska (Backwoods TV doesn't have to involve woods; it's a state of mind), much of the attention is focused on the hazardous-looking work of Sierra Anderson, one of the daughters of the fishing boat's captain. These setups may seem to promote female empowerment, especially since the women are likely to prove themselves eventually. But really they're a last desperate plea for a train-track world in which men serve a useful function. "If she falls in the water during a feeding show, her leg will come off," Mr. Bedard tells Ashley's boyfriend in the opening episode of "Gator Boys," explaining his reluctance to let her do anything but muck out the gator pit. But what he's actually saying is: "Dadgummit, women are sitting on the Supreme Court and directing foreign policy, and I read that soon they won't even need us to reproduce, because sperm can be created from female stem cells. If they no longer need us to protect them from gators, well, we men are pretty much done as an entity. We'll become the appendix of the species: serving no purpose and garnering attention only when we rupture. From the looks of the premiere "Gator Boys" may need the cheesy woman-in-a-man's-world stuff to sustain interest; one wrestling match with a gator seems pretty much like another. The other two shows, however, are compelling without the girl-versus-guys stuff. "Hook, Line & Sisters" - Sierra's sister, Memry, is also on the boat, though she doesn't seem to do much - has a lot of action, including a high-seas collision in the premiere, and dandy camera work to capture it. The show is also a lesson in the arcane world of fishing law. In the premiere Mr. Anderson and crew are going after herring off Sitka, Alaska. This isn't a matter of tossing your net (there are no hooks in sight, despite the show's title) over the side and taking a leisurely chug around the harbor. Some government entity, with little notice, declares specific windows of time for herring fishing, and when the moment comes, a free-for-all ensues in which vessels of various sorts jostle for the best spots at high speeds. The first time an opening is declared, Mr. Anderson's net becomes snagged on ocean-bottom junk (including a bicycle), and the window has closed before the crew can untangle it. While competitors bring in thousands of dollars" worth of herring, he gets nothing. "It's part of fishing," Mr. Anderson says afterward. "That's why they call it "fishing" and not "catching." " "American Stuffers" doesn't have that kind of action, but it does have plenty of droll humor, much of it coming from Dixie the intern. Mr. Ross specializes in stuffing people's pets, and in the premiere he tries to convey to her how traumatizing it can be for an owner to bring a dead doggie into the shop. "To the customer this is like a kid to him," he tells her. "I don't know why you'd stuff your kid, though," she says. The high point of the pilot doesn't involve any stuffing. Someone wants the skulls of a few (presumably wild) hogs preserved as a trophy for his daughter, marking her first hog kill. But the bone-drying process is behind schedule. "The hog skulls have to be completely dry before they can be picked up, and this is a really big problem," one of Mr. Ross's employees announces frantically in what passes for a crisis at XTreme Taxidermy. The customer is expecting the skulls to be ready in a few hours. Mr. Ross, fortunately, is nothing if not resourceful in an emergency. "Go put it in the oven at about 350 and try to bake it out," he says, "the oven" being the one in his wife's kitchen. If it starts stinking up the house, take it out. His wife, LaDawn, a formidable and somewhat scary woman, is out at the time of course. When she returns, it doesn't take her long to realize that something wretched has been cooked in her kitchen, and the rather wimpy-looking Mr. Ross must face the consequences. The goings-on at the taxidermy shop are amusing, but will they last? A program on TLC's schedule for Jan. 11 suggests perhaps not. It's called "I Cloned My Pet." Why stuff "em if you can reanimate "em?