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Deadliest Catch
2005 · TV series · 22 seasons
Created by Thom Beers
Forty-foot waves, 700 pound crab pots, freezing temperatures and your mortality staring you in the face…it's all in a day's work for these modern day prospectors. During each episode we will watch crews race to meet their quota and make it home safely.
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15 comments on Hacker News
24 was Fox, if I'm not mistaken, and its format is very much the same as all broadcast shows.
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
I started casually watching the reality TV series "Deadliest Catch" about 15 years ago, and became a regular viewer since then. In that time span:
- the amount of Bering Sea ice has dropped significantly
- the amount of 100-year storms has increased
- crab numbers have decreased
- crab seasons have been outright canceled due to major population collapses
- crab that remain are seeking deeper/colder water
As much dissembling as people want to do about climate change, you can see with your own two eyes the difference between season 1 and now. They almost never mention climate change on the show. They complain a lot about how "regulations" are destroying the fishermen's livelihood.
They aren't missing anything either. Subconciously I thought that I needed to stay on top of things like the news, how the stock market is doing, whatever the latest tech hardware releases are, etc. but now, most of the time I forget those are even things.
I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
Much of how humans handle their own suffering is determined by their world view. Knowledge workers tend to have a view that we should never be uncomfortable in our jobs. Ever. For a lot of blue collar workers, being uncomfortable is just part of the job. Watch one episode of "Deadliest Catch" to see this in action. A lot of blue collar work is "comfortable being uncomfortable".
This is me, but I watch a couple of episodes of Deadliest Catch, and then plopping down on the Aeron with a good cup of coffee whenever to write code takes on a different perspective. Good luck!
I think plenty of people say that, actually. There was a very popular discovery channel (or maybe history channel) show that followed around various groups of loggers and just about every episode had someone getting injured or barely escaping injury.
Deadliest Catch, similarly, highlighted the risk faced in one of the other most dangerous jobs, offshore fishing.
Yeah. You can try to compare the mass of quality material in one vs the other and I can see why Trek would win that faceoff. But the universe of Wars is just more relatable and this sort of kneejerk biases that way.
• Gritty vs clean
• Thieves and scoundrels vs naval officers
• Genuine clothing vs color coded uniforms
• Misfits save the world from pervasive evil vs bold leaders discovering some weird new thing
• Magic vs Science
• Jumping into a gun turret and swinging it around at your enemy vs “Mr. Worf, target their ships!”
• Swordfights and maulings vs redshirts getting blown up.
I think each of them has its own milieu that it speaks to more, but the internet is for sure gonna pick Star Wars over Star Trek if they just are asked “X or Y?”. Star Wars still has a cool factor while Star Trek still has a dorky factor.
And a lot of that factor comes back to the fact that Trek is better known as syndicated TV. The constraint is that the episodes may be shown in random order, and so every episode or every two episodes, the state of the crew and the ships needs to be returned back to the baseline. The dorkiness comes in part from that aspect where the system gets returned back to where it was.
That's not all of it because Deadliest Catch also has the same aspect where every Deadliest Catch episode is basically the same thing, hah. Firefly kind of can be viewed as the attempt to take Star Wars’ grittiness and somehow make it syndicatable, “we finish the job and you see us a month later seeking out the next job.”
Hot take: the problems here are cultural.
Consider these data points:
1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
As an example, there Discovery channel has a documentary show called deadliest Catch, during with they follow fishermen during crab fishing seasons in alaska. Those crabs are a luxury product, and yet according to discovery the death rate during the main crab seasons averages out to nearly one fisherman per week, while the injury rate for crews on most crab boats is nearly 100%. Compared to fire and police work, I would guess it is much safer to spend a day in their line of work compared to go on one of those boats.
If we look at the top 10 most dangerous jobs we also see a fairly common pattern where safety is a balance between costs and efficiency. Most of those jobs could be made relative safe, but then the cost would go up. While we don't expect restaurant workers to risk their life, we do expect that the roofer to not spend more money on safety that is strictly necessary, making roofers one of the most dangerous jobs.
No, you are not the only one.
But I'll admit sometimes they try really hard to make a pirate out of us by brilliant moves like making 2 out of three LOTR movies available on Netflix or sending all except one single episode of a season of Deadliest Catch on my cable subscription.
Maybe one day I'll start downloading too thought, but usually I don't care and don't have time for movies anyway.
There are (used to be?) a bunch of popular documentary series about these jobs, like "Ice Road Truckers" or "Deadliest Catch" or "Axe Men". Part of the appeal is that these are jobs where you can actually see the work that they're doing. Another part of the appeal is the inherent drama in these workers risking their lives. (There's a strong positive correlation between "rate of workplace accidental deaths" and "how interesting a job seems in a documentary".)
I think another issue is specialization. If you don't actually have a ton of background knowledge about software in general, and your particular software requirements in particular, the things that people that you and I worry about all day aren't really meaningful. Like, if you watch Star Trek, you don't actually know what the technobabble means (because it doesn't mean anything), and the only reason you care in the first place is because the end result is whether or not the ship blows up. Software engineering is like that except without a ship blowing up. Likewise, medical and courtroom dramas are far more interesting than the real life of a doctor or a lawyer because they spend most of their time immersed in the arcane.
Which is kind of what simulators like this help with. You're not going to understand how to drive a train or maintain a Spitfire by reading a book or anything, and nobody actually has to know how to do those things unless they do them for a living, but getting a chance to pretend to do these things in a game gives you a broader understanding and helps you understand and appreciate the people who do these jobs.
On the topic of those shows I hate the false drama in "will they make it on time".
Well yes, global logistics is incredible, the ship is working fine, the weather is good and there isn't a us destroyer for miles so of course they will.
I wish they'd just focus on the engineering and logistics and cut all the bullshit.
I'd also really love it if they'd take a swan dive on specific areas, navigation, maintenance, scheduling all that stuff.
If they made documentaries I'd like they probably wouldn't have many viewers.
Deadliest Catch was good in that regard, some interpersonal stuff (more in later seasons) but the barent sea is dramatic enough alone.
Many of the shows are based on affinity or identity politics so the results are not terribly interesting.
Unsurprisingly a TV show based on affinity for Louisiana or affinity for LA will have by far the strongest signal be predictable affinity for either LA area. Likewise the identity politics, its very hard to express surprise that a TV show carefully engineered to appeal to black people, successfully sells to black people, therefore the map of viewers extremely strongly resembles a population map of black people.
If they had corrected for those effects THEN they would have had interesting data.
I did find it interesting that "deadliest catch" correlates more strongly with latitude than distance from the coasts. I've never watched, but I'd assume its mostly set on a boat?
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Yea, and I also learned how to become a doctor by watching House and ER, fish for Alaskan crab by watching Deadliest Catch, and learned all about how to have relationships by closely studying Friends and Entourage!
So no, that episode of Top Gear does not bring up any "good points" to draw legitimate conclusions about the American South. All it shows is that if you insult the average person enough, they'll get pissed off enough to deliver a few minutes of good footage. Meanwhile, back here in reality (not in TV land) -- if you visited down South you'd find that, given a broad sampling, Southerners are far kinder and warmer than us from New England. (p.s. I'm not from the South).
It gives me great concern that we as Americans assume so much truth from our 30 minute highlight reels.