Sick of the vacuous plastics populating most reality shows? You ain’t alone. Sure, The Hills continues to smash ratings records into its fourth season, but there’s a counter-movement that eschews vaguely pretty fashion publicists in favour of tough-as-nails dudes doing tough-as-nails jobs on deep-sea fishing boats, Texas oil rigs, Pacific-northwest forests and arctic ice roads.

Thom Beers, who earned his stripes filming Jacques Cousteau, has created a cottage industry out of occupational hazards, highlighted by Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers (the latter airs on History Channel in the US but not yet here — even though it’s filmed in the Northwest Territories, fer chrissakes).

After conquering cable, Beers is making his first foray onto network airwaves with America’s Toughest Jobs on NBC. If that sounds more like a cheeseball reality show than the others, well, it is.

The Emmy-winning Deadliest Catch — Beers’ first and finest “testostero-reality show,” which launched in 2005 — concerns rugged king-crab fishermen trawling the frigid Bering Sea and is currently airing its post-season After the Catch specials. Truckers is about Arctic drivers crossing frozen lakes to bring supplies to diamond mines.

While Lauren Conrad’s worst fear is social suicide, these working-class, chain-smoking, shit-talking bad-asses face the possibility of death and/or dismemberment daily. Crabbing, we’re told, has an injury rate of nearly 100 per cent.

These shows’ mesmerizing slice-of-life perspectives fulfill reality TV’s promise to document society’s forgotten realms and celebrate the average Joe. America’s Toughest Jobs, however, adds white-collar softies into the mix and soils the genre with elements of Survivor. Like bad karaoke of Beers’ greatest hits, Wall Street execs, personal trainers and “promotional models” try out these tough jobs themselves, with weekly eliminations and a quarter-million-dollar pot to the eventual winner.

But the reason Beers’ other shows have become so popular is that they document the blue-collar cogs that keep society running. Once you mix in a silly competition, attention-seeking contestants and self-actualizing New Age-y bullshit, it reduces their life-and-death stakes to the worst reality-show frivolities. This disrespects the men who do these tough jobs for a living, not as a lark from “their warm, safe lives.”

DEADLIEST CATCH AIRS SATURDAYS, 1PM AND 3PM ON DISCOVERY; AFTER THE CATCH AIRS TUESDAYS, 10PM ON DISCOVERY; AMERICA’S TOUGHEST JOBS AIRS MONDAYS, 9PM ON NBC.

Happy to be stuck with you
Though I once aspired to host a live-action Beavis and Butthead, I now find shows like MuchMusic’s Video on Trial too mean-spirited. So kudos to MuchMoreMusic’s Where You at, Baby?!, which manages to be charming, interesting and above using mockery as its sole source of entertainment.

The premise, as its title implies, is a riff on the usual “where are they now” and the first formerly famous person to sign on was Huey Lewis. While it’s easy to take potshots from afar, MMM sends Strombo-in-training Matt Wells to Missoula, Montana to hang with the Newsman.
“I was just thinking back to my dad taking me to see Huey Lewis in St. John’s,” Wells says in a camera aside, “and now I’m buying romaine lettuce with him!” No, it’s not as boring as it sounds. Lewis is doing quite well, thank you very much — even enjoying a mini-revival thanks to his Pineapple Express theme — and seems quite open to sharing his post–rock star life. So the pair go grocery shopping, cook supper, four-wheel around Lewis’ sprawling ranch and spend some quality time fly-fishing.

Where You at Baby?! is neither fawning nor contemptuous, but with the next few episodes featuring one-hit wonders Debbie Gibson, Tiffany and Vanilla Ice, it may prove impossible to remain so respectful. In which case, I’ll want a new drug, one that won’t make me sick.

WHERE YOU AT, BABY?! AIRS SUNDAYS, 8:30PM ON MUCHMOREMUSIC