So for this week I watched a 'prime time' show and why not watch one from my favorite childhood station, the Discovery Channel. Unfortunately this is what i found in their 8 o'clock slot on a Friday. Gold Rush is a reality TV show based in Alaska(discovery channel and the history channel have a serious hard on for Alaska at the moment(its tougher in Alaska, ice road truckers, the fishing/crabbing show, and now a new airplane ice road truckers)) that centers around 7 or 8 miners who purchased a claim up in Alaska with the intent to mine gold. So its not like Ive been watching the whole series but this is what i managed to pick up from this one episode. After 3 months of 'mining' they have yielded zero gold out of this location and burned up the $250,000 they had to initially invest in this place. One thing is very clear, not one of these people has ever mined for gold or has any expertise with this equipment. Hell they don't even have a clue how to work half the stuff. But that makes it fun, cause seeing people fail at stuff makes me feel better about myself!
This show features entirely blue collar types, most of these guys could walk on to the set of Ax Men and we would never notice. This seems to be part of an undeniable trend (see above Alaska shows) toward putting working class people on TV as opposed to dressed up, white collar, news caster types. I think that this is an attempt to appeal to the lower/lower middle class and come off as being a down to earth channel, cause you know it is discovery channel after all. In this one episode the one person who is an indoorsy type (they said he used to be a real estate agent) attempts to learn how to use a complex piece of mining equipment by "reading books and studying", and of course he fails, which is no surprise to all the other more rough cut mountain men.
Well I kind of already talked about it above, but that one incident I believe was very telling about who the show is trying to appeal to. Working class people who's jobs are based on experience and a will to do it, rather than training and book smarts. The real estate agent (Dorsey) seems out of place and the other guys are always trying to figure out something that he can actually do. I saw this as perpetuating the stereo type that people from the city 'cant cut it out here' (one of the men actually says "he just cant cut it out here" i wonder if that line was fed to him....) in the 'real' world. This show reminds me of the WWII era USA, when we built stuff and were a working class nation, it seems to be doing its very best glen beck impersonation when it comes to bringing back the glory days, and then just being crazy.
My major beef with this show is that its a completely obvious why these guys are out here, its not because they actually want to mine, its cause they are on TV. I mean what sane person would invest $250,000 into something that they have no idea how to run or operate. It almost seems like that was the Discovery Channel budget for the show so that's all that they were willing to take out of their money pile, and hey if it doesn't work out the network would have our financial back. These guys all talk about gold mining like they just read it out of a magazine, they all know how stuff is 'supposed' to work, but none of them actually know how to do shit. The drama just seems sooooo manufactured too, almost as if the people on set could hear the overly ominous narrator.
This was the first time Ive ever watched this show, and if I can help it, it will be the last. There is no way that I would ever recommend this to another person who is looking for entertainment. This is such a far cry from the show that I remember being in this same time slot when I was a kid (90s), Wild Discovery, which was nothing more than a documentary series on wild life and stuff. When my mom told me to turn the TV off I would always retort with, "but mom! don't you want me to learn!" Now I don't think any kid could dupe their parents with that one, this stuff inst even close to educational.
This is just sad, as I used to really like the steady stream of documentaries that you got from the history channel and the discovery channel, but now their line ups are littered with stupid reality shows based in Alaska, or worse. They still do documentaries, Planet Earth was awesome, but that used to be an everyday thing for them. Now they are likely to break their arm patting themselves on the back for a documentary like that. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that reality shows are killing quality TV.
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