Джон Т. Эдж снимает сериал «TrueSouth» о секретной жизни охотников на уток в Арканзасе

A boom microphone hovers over a plate of catfish as a two-man camera crew works to position themselves around a long table of cheerful diners. A production assistant silently and approvingly observes from beyond her clipboard. Conversations from customers bubble to the surface as I eavesdrop on the surrounding tables: one about an abruptly decommissioned John Deere tractor, another about an alleged moonshiner’s recent run-in with the law. The elderly couple seated at the table next to mine leans over to ask if we’re from around here, presumably because they’ve never seen us before.  “No, sir, we’re from Little Rock,” I reply, rather guardedly. “I guess y’all couldn’t find anything good to eat over there?” the old man says with a wry smile.  Dinner tonight is at Murry’s Restaurant in Hazen, a small Delta hamlet of about 1,400 people. For the locals discussing tractors and moonshiners, it’s probably just another Saturday night. But for me, I’ve got a backstage pass to the making of an episode of “TrueSouth,” ESPN’s Emmy Award-winning food and culture series hosted by the venerable Southern food writer John T. Edge. The episode, which airs on Sept. 29, will eventually range across Prairie County, from Murry’s Restaurant and Big K’s Catfish Barn to Craig Bros Bar-B-Q Cafe and Greenbriar Hunting Lodge, one of the most storied duck camps in the Arkansas Delta.  “Wright Thompson and I took a scout trip through the Arkansas Delta and stopped at Murry’s and ended up in a conversation with [Murry’s co-owner] Mr. [Stanley] Young that opened up the possibilities of this place,” Edge tells me. “From there, we thought about the other things that draw people to this neck of the woods, and that’s duck hunting, that’s Craig’s. … The way we make a show is we figure out people we admire in a place we find interesting, and when those things intersect, we have a show. It’s that simple, and it’s also that complex. … Thompson, who is our executive producer, had been duck hunting in Greenbriar just down the road, so all those things came together.” Murry’s is often the subject of national attention for catfish-enjoyers. In July 2018, Sid Evans, editor-in-chief of Southern Living, declared that the “best catfish in America is served at Murry’s Restaurant, just off U.S. 70 in Hazen, Arkansas. It’s hard to say what makes Murry’s catfish so special, but if you ask [founder Olden] Murry’s son-in-law who has worked there for close to 50 years, he’ll tell you the secret is starting with a good catfish fillet.” Garden & Gun magazine has also been known to throw similar accolades around. But before the days of magazine features and national write-ups from out-of-towners, the seed for Murry’s was planted on a Delta riverboat, where Olden Murry (1921-2002) served as a cook before his career was abruptly ended by an accident. By 1955, he had enough money saved to open his own restaurant in nearby DeValls Bluff (in a retired passenger train car, no less). Through the years, Murry expanded several times, culminating in a complex that famed food writer John Egerton described in 1987 as “a rambling catacomb of interconnected coaches, trailers and pre-fabricated rooms.”  After a devastating fire at the original location in the late ’80s, Murry’s daughter, Becky, and her husband, Stanley Young, took an opportunity to open the next iteration of Murry’s Restaurant at the current location off Highway 70 in Hazen. It was a natural transition as the Youngs had gone to work for Murry in the early ’70s and Stanley had been serving as his protege for over a decade. The Young family continues the Murry’s tradition today — twice a week on Fridays and Saturdays from 5-9 p.m. only. Between B-roll takes of Edge working the room, he meanders back to his post at my table, where my wife and I are just starting to dig into a plate of the restaurant’s famous onion rings — thick cut and hand-battered to absolute perfection. Even though he’s working, he’s nice enough to entertain my questions about his choosing to come to this little corner of the Arkansas Delta. “We can make a hundred catfish shows if we wanted to,” he says. “There are a hundred places in the American South where I can say, “Man, that’s really great catfish,” but there’s no other place like this.”  What makes “this” so difficult to define is what seems, in large part, to interest Edge. Hazen sits a mile and a half off Interstate 40, familiar to most as a place to stop for gas or lunch somewhere between Little Rock and Memphis. DeValls Bluff, about 6 miles east, is smaller still. Beyond town, the landscape flattens into miles and miles of rice fields and flooded timber, interrupted only by the occasional farm shop and duck lodge tucked away into the timber. Edge, however, maintains that there is considerably more to this place than meets the eye.  “This is a deeply rural patch of the American South,” he says. “It also has a magnetic draw to people across the world because of the duck hunting. You know, wealth courses through this county, and yet if you don’t know where to look, you won’t understand it.”  During duck season, private jets touch down across the Delta and their passengers disappear behind the gates of their fancy duck clubs — clubs whose memberships, grounds and histories are largely invisible from their neighbors just down the road. That old contradiction that we as Arkansawyers have come to understand so well — a place that appears modest and, at times, economically devastated, yet draws wealthy sportsmen and businessmen from across the world — became part of the story Edge and Thompson wanted to tell.  “Places that are seemingly inscrutable, like the Arkansas Delta, like Prairie County, like Hazen, like DeValls Bluff — those are great places to try and figure out and to bring viewers along as you try,” Edge says. “I love traveling here. Arkansans seem really interested in telling you about who they are and where they come from. When people are proud of their place, and especially when they feel misunderstood, those are great places to travel.”  Threading this needle is more or less the premise of “TrueSouth.” While the show is nominally about food, it’s really about telling “an honest story about the complicated, flawed, and beautiful place we call home. … We sidestep nostalgia and myth and stereotype to introduce viewers to Southerners who struggle and succeed, dream and fail, and then try again,” according to Edge. Back at Murry’s, the rhythm of the dining room carries on as it has for decades, and the thread of the cameras keeps searching for its needle. I ask Edge what, after all these years of writing about places like this, he thinks a television camera can see that words cannot.  “The camera soaks up so much more than my notebook does,” he says. “The camera gets more than I do.”  When the production crew is operating at full capacity, he explains, four or five cameras may be set up in a room collecting the expressions and small moments that no single observer could hope to catch. “If in fact you’re willing to look past the stereotypes, if you’re willing to look past the myths and magnolias and moonlight, the camera can see a lot more than a single writer like me with a notebook.” As he says it, Stanley Young peers into the dining room from behind the kitchen door with the production assistant by his side. “We’re ready for you, John.” With a cheeky “watch this,” he departs from our table and follows his people into the kitchen. A moment later, Edge emerges with a tray propped above his head, his forearm cleverly draped in a white napkin. He looks like a waiter at a fancy restaurant, if fancy waiters wore denim and T-shirts. As he rounds the corner into the dining room, he looks over and shoots me a wink. “Would anybody care for some blackened duck breasts?” he asks. Hands shoot up for first dibs.