David Rees began his career as a cutting editorial cartoonist, whose “Get Your War On” ran in Rolling Stone for years.
When he found himself working for the census, sharpening pencils, he realized there was a definite way to do it well. That led to a website on Artisanal Pencil Sharpening, a service, in hand sharpening pencils (“shavings are bagged and returned with your pencil”), and a bestselling book, “How to Sharpen Pencils.”
That kind of approach, half kidding, but half full of actually interesting information, is what led him to his next career, television. The first episode of his new 10-part series “Going Deep with David Rees” (National Geographic Channel, 10 and 10:30 p.m.) begins tonight with a practical summertime concern, “How to Make an Ice Cube” and with the very basic “How to Tie Your Shoes.”
As with his other episodes, he seeks advice from ice makers, ice sculptors, ice harvesters, glaciologists and even Buddhist monks. The result: “Heirloom quality cubes.”
Rees had a hundred different ideas for shows, he told reporters at the TV critics press tour last week. Many will round out his season, from “How to Dig a Hole” to “How to Flip a Coin.”
“There’s a couple criteria for a good episode for us,” he said at a session mostly taken up with teaching the perfect way to fold a paper airplane. “One is that if somebody sees it listed on their DVR or their episode summary, they have to think to themselves, “There’s no way I could learn anything about how to open a door.’ Like, ‘This must be a joke’ or ‘I know how to tie my shoes. How are we going to do 30 minutes on this?’
“The fact of the matter,” he said about opening doors, “is we shot, like, nine hours of footage.”
The subjects, he said, have to be “something where you think there’s nothing to learn, because the whole point of the show is to celebrate and really examine the everyday” and prove that it’s only a matter of perspective.
“Paper airplanes are amazing,” he says. “Shoelaces are amazing. Doors are amazing.”
Still, he added, the subjects have to “be something that I am generally interested in. Like I wanted to do how to climb a tree because when I was growing up,” he said. But not allowed to so, he learned all about the topic on the episode. “At the end of episode, I go home, and I literally climb the childhood tree that my mom and dad didn’t let me climb. I make them sit there and watch me. It was profoundly satisfying.”
Topics also have to ones where there may be some interesting experts to consult. “For how to throw a paper airplane, we went and we literally talked to the chief scientist at NASA,” Rees says.
Reporters benefited from this expertise as their planes zipped around the ballroom.