Summer TV

Happy Independence Day, Everybody!

Before we went on vacation, I asked you, dear readers, to post some of your favorite summer TV.

Please allow me now to share my current obsessions, one of which I am watching right now over a very late breakfast (Ains spent the night with her Mamaw last night.)

Jason and I have always turned to the Discovery Channel during holiday and summer TV hiatuses. We are curious people, and shows like Mythbusters and the brou-ha-ha of Shark Week suck us in like moths to a porch light.

This summer, Jason has got me hooked on two Discovery Channel shows I might not have been interested in without his prodding:

Dirty Jobs, and The Deadliest Catch.

There is one common thread in both of these shows: Mike Rowe.

Ladies and germs, I have found my new celebrity crush.

If you have spent much time on this blog, you know that I go through phases of fandom with various males I see on the big screen or the little screen and fall into a child-like giggly crush over. It started with Bruce Campbell, then I went through a David Duchovny thing, and then Jim Carrey, and most recently Jon Stewart (this is NOT to say that I am over Jon, by the way), and then there's perennial crush Bono. This Mike Rowe guy is on my radar now because I am loving those two shows, and I feel the stirrings of crush-love.

For the uninitiated, Dirty Jobs finds Mike going all across America to spend a day in the life of the men and women who do the nasty, back-breaking, thankless jobs that keep the civilized world turning on its axis. It will make you gag, but Mike handles slopping hogs with processed food scraps from Vegas buffets (and he helpled in the funky processing) and digging for blood worms with a mix of boyish enthusiasm and gallows-humor sarcasm. He has this deep, nature-narrator voice, and rugged good looks, and when he unleashes his deathly-dry zingers in the middle of some situation that would have you and I gagging (especially I), it's just damn good television. Laugh-out loud television. And that, my friends, makes him one of the sexiest guys on TV.

He uses that deep nature-narrator voice to invisibly tell the tales of crab fishermen on the Bering Sea in The Deadliest Catch. You can almost smell the testosterone when you watch that one. I don't know if there are any more manly men on the face of God's green earth than those men who make their living on the deadly, icy waters off the coast of Alaska. I would argue that this is the best drama on television; you don't get any more dramatic or real than men fighting the waves and the water and risking their lives to harvest the creatures of the sea. They fight each other, they fight themselves when they've been up for two days straight, they fight the catch, they fight mother nature and all the elements; it's every type of conflict you could possibly have right there in one hour of television. And every bit of it is real, and no one is trying to be a star or a prima donna. They're just doing their jobs and getting filmed doing it in all its dangerous glory.

And then there's After the Catch, where narrator Mike Rowe talks to the captains about what went on behind the scenes of that episode over beer and cigarettes. Those men are the salt of the earth.

Anybody out there with me on the Mike Rowe love? If you have never seen these shows, give 'em a try and post back.