Mike

Ball

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July 28, 2008

Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch: Now This is Reality

One evening not too long ago I was sitting out on the deck with my friend Tom, sipping a mug of beer, gazing at the lake and admiring the festive way our dock twists and undulates its way out into the water. The warm glow of the setting sun bathed the cloud-white sail of a small sloop silently slicing through the glassy evening water, and flooded the trees and houses across the lake in a shimmering pool of golden light.

At that moment Tom finished his beer, stood up, belched and said, “Well, I have to run. The new episode of Ice Road Truckers is on tonight, and it looks like Alex might have a blood clot.”

That sentence probably made a lot of sense to Tom. 

It would also seem like perfectly natural conversation to about 3.4 million other people who consider it a sort of holy experience to spend a warm summer evening watching a television show about chain-smoking truck drivers, battling snow storms and hemorrhoids as they haul loads of mining equipment and human sewage across frozen lakes from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Ice Road Truckers is a wildly successful follow-up to an equally successful program called Deadliest Catch, which documents the difficult and dangerous lives of crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. These shows have earned legions of fans, and have spawned a whole new genre of entertainment that I call “The Deadliest Watch.”

The obvious question is, “Why?”

Both programs are loosely related to the “reality” shows, like Survivor and American Idol, that have been popping up like dandelions in the television landscape over the past 10 or 15 years.

It seems to me that these new Deadliest Watch shows have a draw of their own, which goes way beyond the fact that the bleeped expletives outnumber the intelligible words uttered by a factor of almost two to one. For one thing, they feature real people doing real jobs, rather than carefully-cast wannabe performers carrying out tasks dreamed up by the show’s writers.

For example, if one of the flamboyantly gay designers on Project Runway is unable to deeply and spiritually move the judges with the beauty and wear-ability of his cocktail dress made from garbage bags and Dixie cups, Heidi Klum tries to look stern and says, “You haff been eliminated.” Then the poor victim tearfully cleans out his sewing machine table and hugs all the other contestants goodbye.

On Deadliest Catch, if a deckhand screws up, he gets his head caved in with a 900-pound crab pot.

Now, despite slogans like, “It’s not just a job, it’s a job to die for,” and the strains of Jon Bon Jovi singing Dead Or Alive every time a big wave breaks over the deck of the Time Bandit, I don’t for one moment believe that Deadliest Catch or Ice Road Truckers fans tune in hoping to see anyone injured or killed. While the guys on these shows are statistically doing some of the most dangerous jobs in the world, it is arguable that you will see more actual carnage dodging bargain-glazed drivers in the Costco parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

And the actual tasks these guys perform are by any measure mind-numbingly repetitive. As each crab pot swings up over the deck of the ship we breathlessly discover that it is filled with – who would have guessed it – crabs!

But we watch, fascinated, as Hugh heads out onto the ice with half of an 80-ton derrick substructure on his flatbed. Or when Captain Sig keeps his men on deck for 36 hours straight, hauling in pots and filling the tanks with “keepers.” Or when we learn that at the end of a four-week King Crab season many of the unbelievably hard-working deck hands took home more than $50,000 each.

We even get a lump in our throats when the Hillstrand Brothers polish off a successful run by taking their boat into the cove where they buried their father’s body halfway up the mountainside, then sound the horn and set off M-80s on the deck to “. . . wake the old man up.”

Predictably, there are more Deadliest Watch shows coming along. There is one about roughnecks who work on oil derricks, a new one about tow truck drivers who clean up wrecks on the Interstate, and one about lumberjacks who apparently compete to see who can use a chain saw to lop off the most body parts.

And I suspect that the concept will become watered down with time. I heard that they are shooting the pilot for a show called The Corner of Hope and Hell, the saga of eight middle-school crossing guards in North Scranton who brave extreme weather and having to TiVo Oprah in their dedication to get our children safely to school and home again.

I think maybe I’ll stick with the 900-pound crab pots and frozen lakes cracking under a Peterbilt hauling garbage.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.