Have a beer, watch them die

Rico says hey, not his phrase, but Dana Jennings has an article entitled Grab a Brew While They Face Death in The New York Times about a new series on Spike:

In a trailer for Coal, a new series on Spike about mining in West Virginia, a coal-grimy Jeremy Auville says, “Life in the mines is dangerous, and it will make your wife a widow.”
A few hundred miles northeast, on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, across the street from Madison Square Garden, a stark black-and-white billboard plugging Coal looks as out of place as a stockbroker in a coal mine. But Spike knows the audience for Coal and its brawny brethren like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers. It’s the mostly white-collar guys who go to Knicks and Rangers games, the baby-handed men who commute between Penn Station (beneath the Garden) and the suburbs.
It’s an uneasy modern dynamic. The men on these “documentary-reality” shows sacrifice their bodies and risk their lives doing down and dangerous jobs to try to provide a good life for themselves and their families. But what the producers and viewers want is what they call “good television”; in this case, working-class fantasies aimed at men craving televised booster shots of testosterone. (Ratings show that these series consistently reel in men in the prized but elusive 18-to-49 age group, many of them upscale.)
This is tough-guy television that guzzles beer and pounds its hairy chest. It’s veined with blood and bleeps (lots and lots of bleeps), tats and sweat. And there’s no shortage of it. There are Ax Men (History): rough-and-tumble loggers; Black Gold (truTV): oil-field roughnecks; and Swamp People (History): Louisiana swampers stalking alligators, to name a few.
Then there’s Deadliest Catch (Discovery), the most popular show in the genre with a core audience of some five million viewers, about crab fishing on the treacherous Bering Sea. Deadliest Catch has won two Emmys (with nineteen nominations) and starts its seventh season on 12 April.
In a trailer for Coal, which has its premiere on Spike on Wednesday, Andy Christian, a miner since 1978, could be speaking for all of the men on these shows when he says: “It takes a special kind of man to do this job, day in and day out.”
He’s right. And I know these guys. They’re the kind of work-muscled men I grew up among in rural New Hampshire: loggers and well-diggers, truckers and mechanics, roofers and farmers. Starting at sixteen, I worked with my old man at a factory that cleaned 55-gallon steel drums. At Kingston Steel Drum we burned, scoured, and scalded oil drums, shampoo drums, paint drums, and insecticide drums, and drums plastered with skull-and-crossbones stickers whose contents we didn’t have a clue about. Acid spewed into my boots, paint splattered my face, and my partner and I doused chemical fires with limp garden hoses. The federal government shut the factory in the early 1980s, naming it a Superfund hazardous waste site. So, yeah, I know these guys.
Coal is set at the Westchester Coal Mine in McDowell County, West Virginia. It comes from Original Productions whose many other series include Deadliest Catch, Ax Men, and Ice Road Truckers.Original, headed by Thom Beers, is the leader in this deadly-livelihood school of television. In a video promoting Coal, Mr. Beers said: “It’s a recipe for good storytelling. You basically need high stakes with high reward.” He gets energized by the unpredictable nature of these jobs. Of Coal, he says: “You can have a cave-in, you can have a flood. You can have the air can stop. There’s a million things that can go wrong.” In his best Hollywood voice he also intones: “It’s a great, epic man-against-nature story.”
Coal and its pals trade on our culture of voyeurism. And the manly-men shows, with their diligent filigree of being educational, offer the virtual thrill of consorting with death, of being this close to the taste and reek of danger. And in high-def, man, it’s totally cool.Work is one of the most intimate things we do, though, and the camera violates that intimacy. In Episode One of Coal, a miner is criticized by his boss because the night shift isn’t meeting quota. It’s bad enough to be taken to the mat, but it’s a kind of torture to have it done on national television. And these miners weren’t even paid to appear on the show, a Spike spokeswoman said.
To be honest, it is fascinating to watch crab being wrenched from the thrashing ocean and coal wrested from beneath an Appalachian mountain. And it’s refreshing to hear working-class men discuss their difficult lives, partly because of their invisible presence in our own. It’s their pride and muscle that help to ferry oil and coal to our furnaces, that put crab on our dinner plates.
But these men— in the mine, on the Bering Sea, at Oil Rig 28— end up as commodified as the natural resources that control their destinies. What does it mean when an ordinary man’s life is transmuted into entertainment? Is a life of quiet desperation somehow ennobled if it’s shown on television? Some shows— including Deadliest Catch and Ax Men— also have online stores that sell clothing, video games, pint glasses, and other memorabilia. You can even score a Captain Phil tribute tee-shirt. The death of Phil Harris, captain of the Cornelia Maria, was chronicled last year on Deadliest Catch, spurring record ratings.
Coal and its rowdy buddies make no bones that they sell a whiff of the grave, that each episode is a potential snuff film. A Coal news release quotes a miner named Tom: “When you’re in a pitch-black coal mine 700 feet from daylight, a single misstep, a bump from a headlamp, or a misplaced cord can bring tons of earth caving in around you and your crew.”And this from the Black Gold webpage: “They could get killed in a heartbeat performing one of America’s most dangerous jobs.”
The tag line of Coal is “Danger runs deep,” and its marketing stresses that risk. In Episode One (caution: spoiler alert) no one dies, but one miner is carted away by ambulance, and a half-ton chunk of slate crashes down, just missing some workers. Yep, pretty good TV.
“It’s a tough business, and you’ve got to have tough men,” said Mike Crowder, chief executive of Cobalt Coal, which runs the Westchester mine.
That just might be an understatement. These are rugged, rugged men, and often they’re men on the verge: of brawling, of losing an arm or a leg, of taking a swing at a foreman, of drowning in a fifth of whiskey. Their faces are creased before their time. And on Coal the men speak with fatalism about “the hole”— which is what my dad used to call the steel-drum factory— about working in a “man-made hell”.
Sometimes, though, the camera tries to suggest that they’re more, that perhaps they’re noble savages or, maybe, a rare tribe of homo sapiens caught in the wild— like Meerkat Manor, only with humans. It’s no coincidence, I think, that one Coal photo shows seven miners striding toward the camera, just like the Magnificent Seven. But work is just work, even when it’s backbreaking and wicked.
There isn’t much thinking. You’re fox-alert— ready to respond to any menacing rumble— but you’re also a flesh-and-blood component in the production process. Your mind empties; you take on the rhythm of the job at hand.
“To us it’s just another day,” says Andrew Christian Jr., who’s Andy Christian’s son, about working the mine. “It’s just like going to the grocery store.”
But the camera intrudes on that sense of normality, imposes a false sense of authority on these men, even as the various shows’ makers try to impose a false sense of drama. There’s often movie-thriller-style background music, and lots of hushed narration about lost production, missed quota, and hard-used machines giving up the ghost.
But that’s what work is. Quota’s always being blown, machines are always busting, the same way the men eventually break down.
The camera also nudges some guys into showing off, to take schoolboy risks, to act like television characters. On a recent episode of Ax Men, for example, Shelby Stanga, a Louisiana logger, jumped an alligator, Tarzan style. (The only thing missing was a knife clenched in his teeth.) He claimed he splashed after the gator to try to persuade it to be that night’s supper.
Both the gator and Mr. Stanga escaped undamaged, though, much to the disappointment, I bet, of the guys who’ll be heading to their jacket-and-tie jobs on Monday morning.