Jeremy Clarkson's Charming And Hilarious Reality Show On Amazon Prime Deserves Your Attention

Half of my family (on my mother's side) are farmers. My late grandfather used to keep pigs, hens, rabbits, sheep, and even ducks when I was growing up. He grew various kinds of crops on his field and was also in the cattle business. I've been a city boy most of my life, but I spent numerous summers in his small village as a kid, making all kinds of mischief around the house with my cousins. There was a pure freedom about it that I could smell in the fresh country air. Trees, fields, and hay barns became playgrounds. The farm animals served as friends or foes, depending on how I chose to frame them in my mind for the childish scenarios I crafted in my imagination. I rode on horseback, sat in gigantic tractors, and went on unforgettable fishing trips around the Hungarian countryside, making precious memories that I look back on with searing nostalgia.

But as I got older and became more interested in what my hometown and other cities had to offer, I grew to vehemently loathe the country life. Its novelty wore off. All my close friends and the other side of my family lived in the city. The visits to my grandparents' farm significantly decreased because I tried to get out of them every chance I got. I no longer felt excited or comfortable going there, and I pretty much became an alien among the locals. Now, my grandfather is dead, and I've been living in one of the biggest cities in the world in a foreign country.

I'd never have guessed that I'd find a new appreciation for that lifestyle once again thanks to a phenomenal, if underseen, Prime Video reality show depicting the rural countryside of the Cotswolds in England through a TV personality and some local farmers. Jeremy Clarkson's (former co-host of "Top Gear" and "The Grand Tour") docuseries, "Clarkson's Farm," has not only evoked the bittersweet memory of a vital part of my childhood, but also helped me understand, respect, and even empathize with the tribulations my grandparents faced and fought against as farmers for decades.

The premise of "Clarkson's Farm" is simple. Jeremy Clarkson (British TV presenter, journalist, and now farmer) bought a 1000-acre farm in West Oxfordshire, England, near Chipping Norton in 2008. After 12 years, he decided to try running it himself, while making a television series out of it. It's crucial to point out that Clarkson knows virtually nothing about farming — testing and driving expensive cars for nearly two and a half decades on TV gives you very little useful experience for that, unsurprisingly.

So he surrounded himself with professionals who actually knew a thing or two about how this is done. His number two is farmhand (and later, manager) Kaleb Cooper, an English lad in his early 20s who's practically been a farm worker all his life, barely even leaving the border of his home village. He loves what he does, and more importantly, he's a straight-shooter when it comes to telling Clarkson (with no filter) what he's been doing wrong — and that happens constantly.

Besides him, there's land agent and agricultural specialist Charlie Ireland (aka Cheerful Charlie), who oversees Jeremy's budget, business ideas, and the legal side of things regarding council and other bureaucratic issues. There's Clarkson's so-called Head of Security employee Gerald Cooper (aka The G-dog), a sweet elderly man with a sometimes indecipherable accent, who comes and goes on the property as needed. Other regulars include Alan the Builder, Dilwyn the Vet, and Clarkson's Irish girlfriend, Lisa Hogan.

If all that sounds very calculated and professional, don't let me fool you: "Clarkson's Farm" is replete with incompetent, humorous cock-ups that revolve around how much of an inept, short-sighted, and inefficient layman the host is most of the time. In his 60s, Clarkson still behaves like an impulsive and naughty child, unable to consider the consequences of his actions and deliberately doing things the opposite way than he's told. He screws nearly everything up and then asks the experts to help clean up the mess he made. But instead of being annoying and irritating, this comes off as charming and hilarious entertainment because we're the beneficiaries (and not the sufferers) of Clarkson's troublemaking — we laugh while his employees facepalm at his every move.

Out of the four seasons that have aired so far (with the fifth on its way), each of them has a main objective (alongside many smaller ones) that's usually presented as a "brainwave" of Clarkson's — something that should help him turn the farm more profitable. Admittedly, he's already a millionaire, so he's not doing this in the hope of a fat paycheck. In fact, his investments in his big-scaled ideas often result in massive deficits rather than making any profit. He's filming this passion project to reveal and raise awareness about how bloody tough farming has become for the average British person in recent years. He does much of the labor himself (like harvesting, tractoring, or looking after livestock), and through his failures/losses, we get to witness how simple factors like poor weather, government regulations, animal diseases, or an unexpected pandemic can make or break a farmer's entire year.

Initially focusing mostly on harvesting crops in his fields, Clarkson quickly moves on to launch more business ventures, including the opening of a local shop, running a restaurant, and eventually operating a pub where he aims to sell his own beer, among other things he produces on the farm. Naturally, the incentive for this is generated from buying and breeding livestock, including cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, goats, and even bees. He also grows potatoes, chilies, and mushrooms that he processes in different ways to find an outlet to sell them. In each season, we get to follow the progress he's making and see how much fruit these objectives bear, if any.

But beyond the numbers, legal hurdles, and natural nuisances, the show is a success truly because of its deeply human and genuine stars. We watch them slowly become a close-knit work family that always supports and cares for each other, no matter what. "Clarkson's Farm" is clearly meant to be a fun and amusing little show — which it is despite all the hardships it depicts — but at times, it's also endearingly poignant and heartfelt, encapsulating the struggles and heartbreaks that come with being a farmer. And even if you know nothing about farming, it's virtually impossible not to relate and empathize with these goofballs as they put their hearts and souls into the work to achieve the best possible results.

As much as I couldn't be a farmer today to save my life, watching Clarkson and his Diddly Squat gang for four seasons warmed the soul of the child in me who once ran around at his grandparents' farm with not a worry in the world. That's a feeling we rarely get to have as adults, but "Clarkson's Farm" is the kind of series that offers a chance at that to some degree, and we should take it as often as we can.