Former Press Reporter Nick Watt Shoots Travel Channel’s ‘Watt’s World’ On East End

There is a brand new show on the Travel Channel, in which an intrepid reporter travels to a faraway land to explore the peculiar characteristics of the native populace, lending his keen eye to help viewers better fathom a much-studied and perhaps misconstrued tribe.

The place, of course, is the Hamptons. And the people? That’s us.

But when the East End episode of Nick Watt’s new show, “Watt’s World,” airs on August 11, it actually will be the second time the Scotland-raised, Emmy-winning journalist will take a hard look at the residents and cultures of the South Fork.

Before switching to broadcast news, Mr. Watt started his career as a reporter for The Southampton Press, from 1995 to 1997. And it was that experience, he said, that made him prioritize a return trip to the Hamptons as one of the show’s destinations in its initial 13-episode run.

“I always loved the place, but I never came back,” Mr. Watt said during a telephone interview on Thursday, June 25, from his home in Los Angeles, where he moved from London three years ago. “I was almost scared to, in case it had changed beyond recognition … What was charming about the place is that it’s still charming. It wasn’t disappointing.”

The same can be said of nearly all 17 destinations Mr. Watt and his four-person crew visited last fall. The rules were pretty simple: If they thought a place would make for good footage, off they went.

“The most amazing thing is the freedom they gave us,” Mr. Watt recalled. “They said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ Really, it’s whatever I think is interesting, and, obviously, I hope other people will find it interesting, too.”

This attitude led the crew to Albania to find out why it is “so weird,” he said. They searched for a George W. Bush statue, met with a “sworn virgin,” checked out the Albania Riviera at the insistence of locals, and Mr. Watt even ended up on a talk show—which he was able to appear on only after convincing producers he was an American, not a Scot.

There was an unplanned run-in with a man inked with UFO tattoos on California’s Mount Shasta. A visit to a “boiling lake” in Dominica. Testing the law with a skinny dip in Venice. A trip to France to see if the people there were “rude, or just misunderstood.” And a rather painful trip to the Caribbean studio of famed Beatles producer George Martin.

“Possibly the worst moment of shooting was getting attacked by a swarm of wasps at George Martin’s now-dilapidated Air Studios on Montserrat,” Mr. Watt said. “I was looking for some tools to open a door to get into the main studio space, where they recorded ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ and I was stung walking through a doorway. Then Spencer, the show’s producer, asked me to go back in to look for tools, because we really needed to get into the studio space. So I did. And I got attacked again. And Adam, the camera guy, kept rolling the whole time.”

When it came time for the Hamptons shoot, the crew decided to include Harlem as the episode’s second locale, as Mr. Watt felt that the two places faced similar and intriguing gentrification pressures, with “money from Wall Street coming to their neighborhoods,” he said.

Mr. Watt said he wanted to see if “real life [was] still hanging on,” so he spent time with Sagaponack-based farmer Dean Foster, who discussed his efforts to branch out into potato vodka production. He visited the Shinnecock Indian Reservation and joined a clambake on Flying Point Beach.

The episodic series, which premieres with back-to-back 30-minute episodes on Tuesday, June 30, is a far cry from the experiences that launched Mr. Watt’s career. On one of his very first assignments as a war correspondent for ABC News in November 2004, his crew was caught in a major firefight during the U.S. Marines’ assault on Fallujah, Iraq. The footage and reporting—which Mr. Watt modestly referred to as the result of “dumb luck”—earned him and the crew an Emmy Award for best breaking news story of the year.

That story enabled Mr. Watt to find beauty everywhere he goes, he said, listing Afghanistan—where he camped during the search for Osama bin Laden—as one of his favorite stops on the list of vast, worldwide travels. Cuba was another. And, of course, the Hamptons, with its “potato fields, the light, the food, the little lanes,” he said.

As to the friendliest people he encountered, Montserrat denizens ranked high. As did, to his surprise and delight, the French.

With the inaugural season of “Watt’s World” wrapped, the traveler is already itching to get on the road again, his sights set on Ethiopia, Bolivia, Texas and Greenland, among other locales. Easter Island is also a priority, but not for his crew—a rare case of not seeing eye to eye, he said.

When asked to name one place he couldn’t wait to leave, Mr. Watt met the question with a lengthy silence.

“The thing is, everywhere we went, we wanted to go,” he said. “We had a really good time. Even if a place was terrible, I had great traveling companions, and so the act of traveling was nice.”

“Watt’s World” episodes “Albania: What’s Weirder than Mustaches & Mushrooms?” and “Le Marche & Slab City: Who Is the White Rabbit?” will premiere on Tuesday, June 30, at 10 and 10:30 p.m., respectively, on the Travel Channel. For more information, visit travelchannel.com/shows/watts-world.