If you grew up in this state anytime between the late '80s and early 2010s, you probably remember Huell Howser — the big, booming Tennessean who somehow became the most Californian person alive. California's Gold was public television comfort food: a guy genuinely losing his mind with excitement over a date farm in the Coachella Valley or a fire lookout tower in the Sierras. He made you proud to live here, even when you were twelve and had no idea why.

So where's the 2026 version? The short answer, apparently, is nowhere.

As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "There is no equivalent of Huell." Another local was more wistful, remembering the show alongside Bay Area Backroads: "Huell Howser was so enthusiastic and lovely."

They're right on both counts. And the absence is worth thinking about — not as nostalgia bait, but as a symptom.

California in 2026 is a state that's hemorrhaging residents, running chronic budget deficits, and struggling to deliver basic services. It's hard to be a hype man for a place where the government can't keep the lights on during a heat wave or build a single mile of high-speed rail on schedule. Howser's shtick worked because California was golden — affordable enough for dreamers, functional enough to be proud of, weird enough to be endlessly interesting.

The state is still weird and interesting. But functional? Affordable? That's a tougher sell.

Maybe the reason we don't have a new Huell Howser isn't that nobody's enthusiastic enough. It's that the state has made it genuinely difficult to be enthusiastic. You can't do a joyful segment about a quirky small-town business when that business just got buried in regulatory fees. You can't celebrate California's natural beauty when half the state is on fire because of decades of mismanaged forests.

We don't need a propaganda minister. But a state that can't produce its own cheerleader might want to ask itself why nobody's volunteering for the job.