Grab a Brew While They Face Death

[groovedaddy]

IN a trailer for “Coal,” a new series on Spike about mining in West Virginia, a coal-grimy Jeremy Auville says, “Life in the mines is dangerous, and it will make your wife a widow.”

A few hundred miles northeast, on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, across the street from Madison Square Garden, a stark black-and-white billboard plugging “Coal” looks as out of place as a stockbroker in a coal mine. But Spike knows the audience for “Coal” and its brawny brethren like “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers.” It’s the mostly white-collar guys who go to Knicks and Rangers games, the baby-handed men who commute between Penn Station (beneath the Garden) and the suburbs.

It’s an uneasy modern dynamic. The men on these “documentary-reality” shows sacrifice their bodies and risk their lives doing down and dangerous jobs to try to provide a good life for themselves and their families. But what the producers and viewers want is what they call “good TV” — in this case, working-class fantasies aimed at men craving televised booster shots of testosterone. (Ratings show that these series consistently reel in men in the prized but elusive 18-to-49 age group, many of them upscale.)

This is tough-guy TV that guzzles beer and pounds its hairy chest. It’s veined with blood and bleeps (lots and lots of bleeps), tats and sweat. And there’s no shortage of it. There are “Ax Men” (History): rough-and-tumble loggers; “Black Gold” (truTV): oil-field roughnecks; and “Swamp People” (History): Louisiana swampers stalking alligators — to name a few.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/arts/television/coal-on-spike-aims-to-attract-male-viewers.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28