With the 2005 debut of the Discovery Channelā€™s Deadliest Catch, producer Thom Beers created a wildly successful niche: testostereality. Beersā€™s Original Productions drops two-man camera teams aboard crab boats to collect as many as 13,000 hours of footage every winterā€”raw, rough (really rough, considering the 40-foot waves) material that offers an intimate view of professional peril. Heā€™s since spun out the formula to depict oil riggers on truTVā€™s Black Gold, loggers on the History Channelā€™s Ax Men, game wardens on the National Geographic Channelā€™s Wild Justice, and miners on his new Spike TV hit Coal. There are nights when youā€™ll find three of his shows, which he calls ā€œmodern-day soap operas for men,ā€ airing on different channels. Slate.com television critic Troy Patterson spoke with Beers, who was at his office in Burbank, California.

PATTERSON: There are a lot of blue-collar jobs out there. How do you decide what will make a good show?
BEERS: Anything with high risk and high reward in an exotic location.

Youā€™ve talked about endangering your crew membersā€™ lives, but the shows reflect a moral seriousness. How do you reconcile that?
I never put anybody in a situation I wouldnā€™t be in. My feeling is, if I can do it, you can do it.

Whatā€™s the riskiest show youā€™ve done?
Thatā€™s still Deadliest Catch: itā€™s the weather, the darkness, extreme fatigue, ice storms, electronics; you could hit another boat. But Coal was the riskiest, commercially speaking. The accents are so thick that you have to subtitle a lot. People donā€™t want to sit around and read a documentary.

Itā€™s been more than a year since the passing of Deadliest Catch captain Phil Harris, who died of a massive stroke during season six. Whatā€™s your fondest memory of him?
Talking to him after he had his first heart attack. He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and his sons had just come on the boat to work. Then they charged a flatscreen TV on his credit card. He looked at the camera and said, ā€œThatā€™s why lions kill their young.ā€

How did you become interested in dangerous work?
In college I was a construction worker on a bridge 18 stories over a river in upstate New York. I once saw a carpenter get blown off by a gust of wind and survive. He held on to a four-by-eight piece of plywood and literally floated like a leaf down to the river below.

Why hasnā€™t your kind of programming worked on network TV? You had a multishow deal with NBC, but it fell apart after one season of Americaā€™s Toughest Jobs.
The audience for my shows is about 35 percent female, and for network TV youā€™ve got to get a demo thatā€™s 50-50 or even 60-40 female. But, you know, the third week of Americaā€™s Toughest Jobs, it was up against Monday Night Footballā€”the Packersā€™ first game against Minnesota after losing Brett Favre. Our numbers went down. Iā€™m like, ā€œItā€™s the highest-rated football game in the history of the world, you fucking morons.ā€

After last yearā€™s Emmys, when you lost to the PBSā€ˆseries The National Parks in the Outstanding Nonfiction Series category, you were aggressive about the flaws you saw in the system. How would you change the categories?
Why not have a category for docudramasĀ­ā€”continuing real-life stories? Reality shows Ā­represent 40 percent of the shows on TV, and we have three categories? I donā€™t think itā€™s fair to the artistry of what we do. Iā€™ve got to share my category with a six-part series on the history of Monty Python?

Your reference to the artistry of the shows makes me wonder: What artists have been your inspirations?
I really like underground artists, graffiti artistsā€”Banksy and Shepard Fairey, all the way back to Keith Haring. Guys doing statements. Years ago I was stuck on a ship run aground on Cold Bay up in the Aleutians. Iā€™m sitting there in a storm wondering what the fuck am I doing here, and I look up and see this graffiti inside the hull: IF YOU'RE NOT LIVING ON THE EDGE, THEN YOU'RE TAKING UP TOO MUCH SPACE. And I just started laughing. The whole idea of life is just to hang on and be tenacious.

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Of course, spectacles about the end of life as we know it are nothing new. In 1938, Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds freaked out an audience worn down by the Depression and uneasy about the possibility of war. In the Atomic Age, viewers saw their anxieties reflected in thoughtful schlock like Them! while such early-seventies flicks as The Poseidon ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų and Airport channeled Vietnam-era angst into tales of localized disaster. The villains change, but the story remains the same.

The differences this time around may be that we’re all feeling particularly vulnerableĀ—and that the villains seem to be coming at us from so many fronts. After the safe and prosperous nineties, when Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day played as nothing more meaningful than a gung-ho special-effects demo, we settled into a sense of relative security. But now our nerves are strained by economic meltdown. And health-care costs. And climate change. Just four years ago, seeing Tom Cruise and his kids run from aliens in the War of the Worlds remake was entertainingly spooky. But with the Dow Jones depleted and unemployment soaring, watching Viggo Mortensen and his onscreen son wander an empty American landscape in The Road hits closer to home. Even Keanu might seem prophetic as an interstellar eco-activist, a circumstance indeed worthy of a whoa.

The truth is that in these troubled times, a big-screen apocalypse could be just what you need. The genre’s endurance is a testament to its skill at purging anxieties, andĀ—witness the pluckiness of Wall-E’s robot heroĀ—such films regularly pay tribute to resilience, promising that civilization will soldier on through just about anything. This is Hollywood, where hope (unlike, say, your 401(k) earnings) is never lost.

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