A Moment With Brad, A Moment that Could Be His Last!
August 19, 2011
Reality shows, let’s face it, they’re not going anywhere. People seem to like them and they’re cheap to produce, which makes executives like them even more, but some times reality can be boring, really, really boring.
Today I’m talking specifically about the “dangerous workplace” shows, like Deadliest Catch, Axmen and Ice Road Truckers, shows the chronicle the lives of crab fishermen, lumberjacks and well, ice road truckers respectively. The hook of these shows is that they show a profession that ordinarily you wouldn’t know much about in a glorifying light. Nothing wrong with that. Only thing is once you’re fully informed about the ins and outs of the profession the show becomes procedural and boring. At least that’s how I’ve grown to perceive them. That’s when the show’s secondary hook comes in handy. These jobs are really fricken dangerous!
Deepsea fisherman and lumberjack rank among the top of the list as far as occupational fatalities are concerned, and driving on an ice road always has the constant looming threat of breaking through the ice and drowning in an icy tomb. Now as far as I know no one has actually died in one of these shows, (save for one of the Captains on The Deadliest Catch, but that was due to natural causes,) but if you watch the commercials for these shows you’d think these people were dropping like flies. Almost every promo is edited to have a dark tone that implies something terrible happened, usually followed by some sort of hyperbole, like, “in the most riveting, shocking, exciting, buzzword #304 not found, explosive episode of the season!” or some other such bullshit. But in the end nothing happens, someone slips on the deck, a tree falls relatively close to someone, or a truck skids off the road. Everyone’s fine, no one’s hurt, but you watched the episode anyway on the off chance that someone met his demise.
They’ll hyper charge pretty much anything. I remember one promo that ran for like two weeks for an episode of Axmen. One of the trees they fell had a bee’s nest in it, and rightfully so the bees were none to happy about it and attacked the guys on the ground. Now from the promo you’d think these guys were mercifully attacked by killer bees or something, but in reality all that happened was one of the guys had a minor allergic reaction and drove himself to the hospital. He drove himself! Now myself being someone who is susceptible to anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, I can safely tell you someone who is able to calmly drive himself to a hospital from a remote logging site in the middle of nowhere after being attacked by bees was at no time in any mortal danger, but that's not what the producers would want you to believe.