Saturday, May 19, 2007

Catching the Deadliest Catch on TV

I don't watch a lot of television anymore, but whenever I have access to a television with more than three channels, I always try to catch "Deadliest Catch" on the Discovery Channel. Even the Discovery Channel is giving in to this reality-TV stuff. Or wait, wasn't the Discovery Channel one of the originators of reality-TV? I mean actual reality-TV as in the stuff they're showing was actually real? Anyway. Deadliest Catch follows the crew of five or six crab fishing boats in the Bering Sea. It's all very dramatic. In one episode three of the fishermen went overboard and only one was fetched out alive.

In another episode, one of the crew members approached his captain to confess that he was hoping they could finish the fishing and go back to shore as soon as possible because he had a court date in Seattle coming up and if he didn't show he'd be put in the slammer for eight months. His captain, like all of the captains, seemed to spend most of the days estimating how much money he was going to make and barking out orders. Not exactly your sympathetic character. Or, as Chris put it: "Why that guy would ever think that captain would give a shit about his problems, I'll never know." In the end, they caught enough crab to get ashore in time for the guy to make his court date. By one day. Talk about cutting it close.

This show is addictive, but it has made me wonder if I should ever eat crab again considering the true cost.