The Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs” is presently my absolute favorite show on television, and may rate right up there among my all-time favorite shows next to “Star Trek”, “St. Elsewhere” and “Green Acres”.
The appeal of the show isn’t so much the myriad variations of shoveling shit as it is the ability of the host, Mike Rowe, to turn each one into a memorable and often hilarious experience. This show would be close to unwatchable with almost any other host, I think. The folks at Discovery Channel (and their various related networks) have an uncanny ability to keep going back to the well and coming up with brilliant choices for program hosts, as well as a willingness to dump any host that doesn’t instantly catch fire with the audience. This has let them turn a handful of BBC copycat shows and other uninspired high-concept programs into sure-fire hits. “Dirty Jobs”, though, may be the pinnacle. Having done his time in all sorts of lame TV presenter jobs, Rowe knows how to do the basic job flawlessly, but he’s clearly 100 times smarter than the average blow-dried TV host and knows how to keep his sense of comic disbelief at the EXACT perfect level under the surface while playing right along with whatever impossibly disgusting task he’s expected to perform.
Yesterday, one of the bloggers at Wired posted a first-rate interview with Mike Rowe that does a fine job of capturing the guy’s essence (something that most media puff piece interviews never do). From the lead-in to the interview, I gather that Wired is putting together some video programming of their own (though it isn’t clear if the videos will be web-only or shown on some cable network), but they’re going to be hard-pressed to duplicate the package that “Dirty Jobs” brings to the screen.
Oh, and in the off chance that you haven’t seen them yet, here are some Mike Rowe video clips from his stint on a home shopping channel in the early 90s, trying to make his overnight graveyard shift a little less dull with some opera karaoke.
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