History Channel: Sundays 9 PM EasternI'm always on the lookout for another guilty pleasure. I've loved COPS since 1989, and I'll even admit to memorizing Dirty Harry's “Do ya feel lucky?” speech. Well, nearly.
But I don't want too much guilt. It rots the soul. So I won't watch Povich or Springer. I couldn't care less if DNA shows that one guy or the other is some poor kid's pitiful excuse for a father.
But Ice Road Truckers is a candidate for my new guilty pleasure. No plot, but “reality” that I might relate to. I watched an episode called “Accident Alley,” part of the third season of the series.
The premise is simple: follow northbound and southbound eighteen wheelers and listen to the men and woman who negotiate an “ice road:” this season, five hundred miles of the dangerous Dalton highway that stretch north from Fairbanks Alaska to Deadhorse on Prudhoe Bay. The show follows Jack, George, Lisa, Tim, Hugh and Alex as they push their rigs over mountains and, sometimes, over the frozen Arctic Sea! (Did they really place a camera under transparent ice to shoot Lisa Kelly’s truck passing above or was it CG? I can’t tell.)
A couple of years ago I negotiated the Adirondack mountains, driving a big U-Haul through snow and ice for endless hours... and I had to make two round trips! So, I reasoned, I have an affinity for brave souls who push s teel behemoths over tundra just to be sure that gasoline gets to my wheezing guzzler. An Alaskan white-out reminded me of that same Adirondack route with my wife; her head sticking out of the window like a frozen Dalmatian, trying to see the edge of the road. We were terrified.
But these truckers have a cool professionalism that is worth watching, at least for a time. They're pragmatic. Trucker Jack Jessee says “Hitting a moose is like hitting a brick wall… its going to tear your truck all to pieces.” They’re fatalistic: “There are two kinds of drivers on the road: the ones that have been in the ditch, and the ones that are going to go in the ditch.”
The show uses lots of stationary cameras placed under or on the side of trucks, or they put one on the road so that a big rig can blast over it, or have a cameraman shooting trucks as they approach or pass by, and even aerial footage of the trucks as they plow through the snow. And that raises a question: Can we really believe that these truckers are in such a terrible hurry when they obviously have to take time out from their runs to set up the shots? And if some of the shots are staged, then how much of this “reality” drama isn’t really real?
Then there is the repetition. The show uses the same film clips over and over again. We see a moose nearly getting creamed as it crosses the road three times, and Lisa looses her breaks three times as well. The computer recreation of a truck turning over and spilling its load is shown, you guessed it, three times.
Do the producers figure we’ve forgotten what happened already? Or is there just not enough interesting stuff happening to hold my attention for an hour? I actually watched somebody fix a flat tire, and I’ll never get that time back. And how often will I have to hear people praising the product-placement tools?
Yes, ice road truckers have courage, and there is a natural drama to their dangerous work. Like airline pilots, their lives reflect “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” But there is just too much boredom to keep me interested.
The Guru
