TV personality Frank Fritz has suffered a stroke.
His former “American Pickers” co-host Mike Wolfe revealed the news of Fritz being hospitalized Thursday.
On social media, Wolfe posted an image of Fritz and a caption asking fans to “pray for my friend,” USA Today reported.
According to TMZ, Fritz last appeared on the History channel show in March 2020, having stepped away after undergoing back surgery.
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According to History.com, the show followed Wolfe and Fritz as they zig-zagged across the U.S. to shop for junk and restore it to its former glory, consistent History.com.
Fritz became an element of the show in 2010, People reported.
Fritz has opened up about his health problems in the past, including discussing his life with regional enteritis during an interview with The Sun.
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While official details of Fritz’s current condition are slim, some of his other former “American Pickers” co-stars have taken to social media to voice their support.
It’s unclear when Frank Fritz went into the hospital, but Mike Wolfe offered unequivocal words of support for his former “American Pickers” co-star on his Instagram post.
“Frank has suffered a stroke and is within the hospital,” Wolfe wrote. “Please keep him in your hearts and thoughts.”
Wolfe concluded the post by saying, “Frank, I pray quite anything that you make it through this okay. I like you, buddy.” Fritz’s last appearance in “American Pickers” came in March 2020, and he’s been largely out of the general public eye ever since.
The 23rd season of “American Pickers” is currently airing on History, with Wolfe, his brother Robbie Wolfe, and longtime star Danielle Colby being the most personalities on the show now.
Colby took to her Instagram page on Friday, July 22, to point out her support for Fritz in a since-deleted post (via Outsider). “Frank, you fight you,” she said. “I’ve watched it for nearly two decades. Just keep it up, fighting. Never stop fighting.”
Meanwhile, Robbie Wolfe also shared a candid snap of himself and Fritz with a hopeful caption: “Frank is within the hospital recovering from a stroke; he’s improving a day. Keep him in your thoughts and prayers as he goes down the road to recovery.”
Reality TV gets a nasty rap—and usually, pretty deservedly so. This is, after all, the genre that spawned the Kardashians and, therefore, the Real Housewives, either of which should be enough to pack up any new show pitch that doesn’t involve a script.
Yet somehow, producers occasionally encounter genuine, interesting people and convince them to urge themselves in front of a camera.
Watching a gaggle of rich ladies screams at each other about mean tweets seems like a waste of time when you can be following real homicide detectives the moment they catch a case or a man who’s getting plastic surgery to look like a human, Ken Doll.
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This is often a list of exactly those types of shows that will have you wondering why you learned who Kylie Jenner was in the first place.
Capturing the tough environment of commercial king crab fisherman in Alaska, Deadliest Catch has become one of Discovery Channel’s most successful shows.
Whether or not all of the dialogue was scripted and the interpersonal drama was manufactured by meddling producers or editors, these guys are still on boats in freezing temperature, all so gluttons can eat their fill at Red Lobster.
Oh yeah, and sometimes they die. Did we mention that? within the first season, a ship sank, and five people perished. It doesn’t get far more real than that.
Another show about life on boats—albeit on the opposite end of the spectrum from Deadliest Catch—is Below Deck, a show about a few luxury yacht crews hosting charters for wealthy jerks.
There are many goofy, obviously-staged situations, but the workplace tension seems genuine. The crew members work long hours, then need to share cramped co-ed living quarters while grinning and bearing it to appease their charter clients, who are unapologetic and pretentious within the show’s best moments clowns.
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Fortunately, most of them get hammered on real alcohol. They slur their way into looking like complete morons on television, the singular joy and only redeeming quality of the show.
Forget Bear Grylls, whose name alone causes you to stop and say, “No, there’s not an opportunity that’s a real person.” If you are looking for a survivalist show, look no further than Les Stroud’s amazing Survivorman.
This guy is sort of a real-life MacGyver minus the mullet. Getting dropped off within the middle of Earth’s most remote locations with nothing but his camera gear (he shoots the entire show by himself), a kind of utility knife, a satellite phone (for emergency calls to a foreign crew who are always close enough for a rescue), and therefore the bare minimum of supplies, Stroud must find how to survive for days at a time.
There are not any celebrity cameos, no airlifts to luxury hotels in the dark, and no drinking his pee. provides it up, Grylls. you’ve Kate Hudson with you.
Former chef Anthony Bourdain traveled the planet in this incarnation of the same show he’d been doing since No Reservations. True, the concept is analogous to most other travel shows: the guy goes to a place. Guy observes local traditions. Guy eats local food.
But Bourdain’s show differed in the intentional avoidance of tourist traps and cliché experiences. He used fixers, friends, and native craftsmen to navigate him past the guidebook stops and into homes and businesses that represent “the soul of the city”—a phrase at which Bourdain would most definitely scoff.
He was constantly self-deprecating, almost wanting to expose the artifice of television at all costs, which always made for a stimulating, if not a contradictory, attempt at documenting a real experience.
From the identical network as Hoarders, A&E, Intervention follows an equally horrific subject—drug addicts. Intervention pulls back the curtain on the ugly reality of addiction by capturing heartbreaking family confessions, actual explicit narcotics use, and therefore the eventual trip to recovery.
The addicts mostly sleep in deplorable poverty, their families get torn apart, and there are nearly always children caught in the middle of all of it. By the top of each episode, you’re hoping desperately for the title card to reveal a cheerful ending, but plenty of the time, you get the same bleak conclusion: once you go down the path to addiction, the road back is nearly impossible.
