I Must Go Down To The Sea Again

TV watching is a “feast-or-famine” situation for me. I only regularly watch about half a dozen shows, all of which have either limited runs or produce new episodes in small batches. That means that some of the shows I like are only on a couple of times a year, and others I get to watch in six-week clumps then ignore for three months while they repeat over and over. It doesn’t help that a good number of the shows are on the Discovery Channel, which has never met a series it couldn’t run into the ground by airing it four times a day, five days a week.

For those of you just dying to know about my television watching habits, these are the shows I watch regularly: (after the jump)

• Dirty Jobs — almost certainly my most favorite show for the last couple of years. I just never get tired of Mike Rowe, even if the jobs aren’t always all that interesting (or even dirty). And you can never have too much poo on cable television.
• MythBusters — yes, it’s completely arguable that these guys have jumped the shark and lately spend way too much time playing with that hellacious car-mounted mini-gun, but it’s still fun to see them bust urban legends, movie physics, and other improbable pseudo-scientific notions. Plus, Kari Byron. (Oh, yeah. I would dump Valerie Bertinelli like yesterday’s oatmeal for Kari Byron)
• The Amazing Race — see, this is exactly what I mean. It’s on only once or twice per season, with lots of nothing in between. Yes, there was one season where they had FOUR races and almost killed the show, but they learned their lesson. Frankly, even *I* was tired of TAR
• Dancing With The Stars — Just shut up. When you can get away with dressing like Edyta Sliwinska or shaking your moneymaker like Karina Smirnoff, THEN you can make fun of me. And, for what it’s worth, I think Tom Bergeron is the best ad-libber working in live television.
• Deadliest Catch — Another show that only produces a limited run, although Discovery Channel flogs the living daylights out of it.

I wanted to talk about “Deadliest Catch” for a moment because last night was the premiere episode of Season Four, and this morning Slate had an article about the show and some of the other “manly man” reality shows like it. The writer, Robert Weintraub, coins a rather ungainly phrase to sum up all of these shows: “Jungereality”. His premise is that “Deadliest Catch” is the direct descendant of the immensely popular film “The Perfect Storm” and its original book by Sebastian Junger. Weintraub says that Junger originally thought he’d write a series of books about these manly-men jobs, but his follow-up book to “Perfect Storm”, “Fire”, is a collection of magazine articles about war zones like Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, and his most recent book, “A Death In Belmont”, is about the Boston Strangler murder case. So, while I agree that the producers of “Deadliest Catch” do indeed owe a great debt of gratitude to Junger (along with George Clooney and the scariest special effects shot of a wave EVAR), I’m not so sure I buy the idea that there’s a whole genre that can be credited to him.

Indeed, I would counter-argue that all of the other shows Weintraub mentions in his article are the in-bred brainchildren of the suits at the Discovery Channel who seem to operate from the standpoint that “more is better”. Got a successful show? Make sure it’s scheduled for every single daypart of the week! Got a REALLY successful show? Shamelessly rip it off by making two or three copycat versions and use the hit show as a tentpole to program the other ones around. The particular shows that Weintraub works into his article — “Ax Men”, “Ice Road” and “America’s Port” — are all recent Discovery Channel entries and all produced by the same guy who came up with “Deadliest Catch”. In fact, this producer, Thom Beers, might as well BE the Discovery Channel given how many shows he’s produced for them. So maybe the more appropriate name for this genre should be “Beers-o-vision” (which I think is Homer Simpson’s favorite network, by the way). I would also point out, no offense to Thom Beers, that while some of the shows he develops are nothing short of fucking brilliant, for the most part the copycat shows are weak sauce. After “Deadliest Catch” was such a big hit in its first season, Discovery Channel ran a Beers-produced series about lobster fishermen on Cape Cod called “Lobster Wars”. After watching the deckhands on the Alaskan crab boats working in sub-zero weather and sailing in blizzard conditions, risking their lives to haul in traps crammed full of huge crabs, the lobstermen looked like a bunch of pussies taking day-trips on a pleasure boat.

Not all the copy-cat shows come from Original Productions (Beers’ company); This season Discovery Channel has ripped off “MythBusters” with a show called “Smash Lab” that does away with the pretense of trying to dispel common myths and just gets down to the business of blowing things up and driving cars into walls and shit. It sucks, right down to the token female cast-member, who isn’t the least bit hot. Plus they take themselves waaay too seriously. Kids — no one is really going to try to stop a car chase with a fire extinguisher, get over yourselves.

“Deadliest Catch” has been hugely successful for everyone involved, including the fishermen. I’ve posted before about some of Sig Hansen’s schemes and dreams. In fact, Cap’n Sig is even an executive producer of “Deadliest Catch”, so you know he’s getting his share. Many of the boats featured in the show have their own websites. And, of course, they all sell swag. The brothers who run the F/V Time Bandit have just published a book about their lives, and one of the crewmen aboard the F/V Rollo published a book of original photographs taken aboard the ship during crab season a couple of years ago. I can’t say as I blame any of these guys for cashing in; I’m sure I would do the same thing in the same situation. Hell, it’s got to beat crab fishing in the Bering Sea.

In general, reality shows hinge on the unpredictability of the situation, and these “Jungereality” or “Beers-o-vision” shows are no different in that regard from “Dancing With The Stars” or “The Bachelor”. It was inevitable that series producers like Thom Beers would hit on “manly-man” concepts as “reality” caught on as a concept and began cannibalizing every conceivable idea for a television show ever imagined. I don’t know that they tap into anything except a hot demographic, and, let’s face it, so did the home remodeling shows five years ago and the chef competition shows two years ago and so on.

For the moment, I am happy because April is the month where all my favorite Discovery Channel shows roll out new episodes AND “DWTS” is in full-swing at the same time. I got my DVR working overtime to keep up with it all, and just as some of these shows are petering out at the end of May, a new “TAR” should be starting up. It’s good to be me right now.

Related Posts:

• Deconstructing Mythbusters
• The Long, Slow, Sudden Death Of Captain Phil
• Just Tell Them Adam And Jamie Did It
• Allez Wii-sine!
• Invasion Of TEH CRABS!