Captain Phil Harris (19 page)

To many viewers, the words “reality show” conjure up images of
American Idol
and
Dancing with the Stars
. It is safe to say Thom will never be found in a studio producing programs like that. Thom’s idea of a reality show is found outdoors, in the harsh climate of icy roads, the lurking danger in wild jungles, and the stormy waters of the Bering Sea.

“He is the unchallenged king,” wrote the
New York Times,
“of a reality television form, variously known by names like ‘macho TV’ or ‘testosterone reality,’ that has swept across cable channels like a ratings-driven wildfire.”

Thom was producing such material in various forms long before anyone had even coined the term “reality show.”

While working for Turner Broadcasting and Paramount Syndicated Television for a dozen years, he produced specials with oceanic explorer Jacques Cousteau along with series like
National Geographic Explorer
,
Network Earth
, and shows like
Harley-Davidson: The American Motorcycle
and
The Incredible Life and Times of Robert L. Ripley, Believe It or Not.

In 1997, Thom formed Original Productions to expand his vision of bringing stories of the wild and crazy to the screen. His company’s shows have included
Ice Road Truckers
,
Ax Men
,
Black Gold
,
Swords: Life on the Line
,
Monster Garage
,
Biker Build-Off,
and
Backyard Nation
. He created a program entitled
Wild Things
that he described as “
National Geographic
meets
Cops
” and the show whose title best describes the ideal Thom Beers format:
1,000 Ways to Die
.

Original Productions currently has fourteen reality shows on the air and three more in preproduction. It has programs on seven networks, with at least one show on the air every night of the week.

But the program for which Thom is best known, the one that has elevated his reputation beyond all the others, is
Deadliest Catch
. Creator and executive producer of the show, Thom doesn’t claim to be a genius who foresaw its potential from the beginning. Initially, it wasn’t even a full program, just part of an agreement with the Discovery Channel to produce a two-hour special entitled
Extreme Alaska
.

Given a stack of possible material for the program, Thom started wading through it.

“I’m reading about musk oxen,” he said, “mountain climbing, exploring dormant volcanos, all the insanity of Alaska.”

Then Thom stopped, his eyes fixed on one article headlined “The Deadliest Job in the World.” It was the world of crab fishing. He needed no more bait: he was hooked.

Having spent six years with Cousteau as his executive producer, sailing the world with him, Thom was already comfortable at sea when he headed for Dutch Harbor with a cameraman and soundman in January of 1999.

He would soon discover, however, that Jacques Cousteau and Phil Harris, though both men of the sea, lived in very different worlds.

“I figured I would talk my way onto a crab boat,” said Thom.

That he did. He and his two-man crew got aboard the
Fierce Allegiance,
captained by Rick Mezich, for what was supposed to be a four-day trip.

“I felt like Gilligan,” said Thom.

He felt a lot more like the most famous shipwreck victim in TV history shortly after the
Fierce Allegiance
entered the heart of the Bering Sea.

“Little did I know we were about to roll into the worst storm in that area in thirty years,” Thom recalled.

Two hundred miles out at sea, the boat hit winds blowing at close to seventy knots with waves cresting at forty feet.

Welcome to the deadliest job in the world.

“It went way beyond seasickness,” said Thom. “We all thought we were going to die.”

What amazed him, impressing upon him from the start that he was in the company of men who redefined toughness, was that, while he and his two-man crew hung on like passengers on a runaway roller-coaster, praying it would stop, the boat’s crew went about their business like it was just another day at the office, dropping pots, hauling them up, and sorting the crab.

The only effect the weather had on the boat’s crew was to delay the return to port, providing an opportunity for two more days of fishing.

“These were hard-ass, hard-core guys,” said Thom, who realized he had found Alaska at its most extreme in the waters far off the coast of the forty-ninth state. “Waves were blowing across the deck and crew members were getting swept in every direction except overboard. It was insanity.”

Insanity that Thom and his own crew captured on camera, giddy at the thought of how good all this would look on screen.

By then, he didn’t need any further assurance that he had found the macho men who could provide him with the next great reality show. Nevertheless, he found additional proof belowdecks when he went down to the galley.

It was about twenty minutes after a particularly rough wave had smashed into the boat. One of the deckhands had been injured by the torrent of water, hurled with such force that one of his legs had been torn open, blood everywhere.

Thom found the deckhand on the galley table, sewing up the deep gash with a needle and thread. All alone. No one to help him, nothing to deaden the pain.

“Dude,” Thom told his cameraman, “we ain’t in Kansas anymore. This is a whole new breed of guy.”

The adrenaline flowing through him enabled Thom to shake off any apprehension he felt about the hazardous conditions and focus on the amazing sights and sounds before him.

It became a mantra for him as he kept telling himself and his cameraman, “Just get it on tape. Get it on tape. Get it on tape.”

Thom had one camera that, on slow speed, could run for four hours.

He decided to tape it to the mast to get an aerial view of the deck and the sea beyond. With precision and ingenuity, he and his cameraman positioned the lens to get the ideal perspective and then securely fastened the camera to withstand whatever the angry sea might subject it to.

That was great, until the four hours was up and the camera had run out of tape. So Thom or his cameraman had to keep climbing back up that mast, struggling at times to hang on as the boat rocked violently.

“We had to do it even in the middle of storms,” said Thom, “and I’m thinking, What the hell am I doing?”

While he and his cameraman were able to get the crowd-pleasing shots they wanted, pulling story lines out of the deckhands was not
easy. There was no Phil Harris, Sig Hansen, or Johnathan Hillstrand in that first group.

“The crew of the
Fierce Allegiance
were not TV guys,” said Thom. “They didn’t have wise-ass personalities. They were just a bunch of hardworking guys.”

Guys who didn’t really get the concept that would grow into
Deadliest Catch
. Didn’t really understand the potential for worldwide exposure.

•   •   •

At first, the deckhands just ignored Thom’s group, paying attention to them only if they got in the way.

Determined to win the crew over, Thom did everything he could for them, from cooking their meals to doing their laundry, even helping pull crabs out of pots.

After the third day, he knew he was finally accepted. That day began with Thom crawling out of his bunk after a few precious hours of sleep, unable to straighten out his fingers. They were frozen in a condition referred to by crab fishermen as “the Claw.”

It’s very common for deckhands, after hours and hours of grabbing crabs out of pots in subzero temperatures, to find their hands are stuck in that gripping position, as if there were crabs still in their palms.

Normally, moving the hands around after rising, along with a warming sun on good days, loosens them up. Unaware of that, Thom, desperate for relief, was thrilled when a deckhand gave him a solution.

Uric acid, Thom was told. That’s the best way to eliminate the stiffness.

Translation: urine.

Not about to turn down any suggestion that would allow him to grip a camera again, Thom walked out on deck, unzipped his fly, and proceeded to pee on his hands.

As he did so, he heard peals of laughter coming from above. Looking up, he saw the entire crew leaning on a railing, thoroughly enjoying the prank they had pulled.

Thom had become one of the guys.

As the trip stretched to a week, he and his film crew began to run out of cameras.

“We burned through all five we brought,” he said. “Because of the saltwater, they were done. I started borrowing some of the guys’ personal video cameras.”

Thom even took the deck camera, used by the captain to constantly survey the ship.

“At the end, I had no alternative,” he said. “Today, on these boats, we bring millions of dollars of technology. Back then, it was just me and two guys with nothing left at the end.”

When he got back to Dutch Harbor, Thom realized he was fortunate just to be able to be back on solid ground, cameras or no cameras. The storm had taken seven lives from two boats, the
Lin-J
and the
Seawolf
.

The plan had been to spend just twelve minutes of the two-hour
Extreme Alaska
special on crab fishing.

But when Thom flew back home, he told officials at the Discovery Channel, “Look, there’s something bigger here than just twelve minutes.”

He got no argument from executives at Discovery. “Jaws were dropping every minute that segment was on,” said Clark Bunting, former president and general manager of the channel. “It was hard to believe anybody does this for a living.”

Thom got another sixty thousand dollars from Discovery, flew back to Alaska with more cameras and fresh ideas, and got enough material for a sixty-minute special.

It was called
The Deadliest Job in the World
.

“Like many of our reality shows,” Thom said, “it was based on high stakes and high rewards in a really unique location.”

The same could be said for Thom himself: high stakes and, as it turned out, a high reward.

“With no promotion,” he recalled, “the show popped four million
viewers, a massive number. It was the most lucrative show Discovery ever did.”

Yet it took another three years before the decision was made by the network’s officials to again dip their collective toes into the Bering Sea. In 2003, they commissioned Thom to head north once more, this time to produce a three-hour special.

Fortified with an enlarged film crew of six for the sequel, Thom, already knowing the kind of dramatic footage he could get, focused on finding some equally dramatic story lines to flesh out the show. The crew spread out, going to Seattle and Kodiak in addition to Dutch Harbor to find colorful captains to headline the program.

With around 250 boats in the Bering fleet back then, there were plenty to choose from.

“We had a real luxury when it came to casting,” said Thom.

This time, he didn’t have to do anybody’s laundry to be accepted. Those in the crab industry had seen the one-hour special and the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the material. They realized what being in the camera’s eye could do for them.

“I think when you are in a position like Phil and all the other captains and you’re out there alone in the Bering Sea,” said Thom, “the water could pull you in one day and it would be like you never existed.

“So many people go through their whole lives, do a great job in whatever profession they are in, take care of their wives and kids, and then they’re gone, merely a memory.

“But a good television show can immortalize you. It can allow you to make your mark in the world. That’s especially true of crab boat captains. They are so damn heroic, rulers in their own little kingdom.”

Of all the captains that Thom was interested in, only three or four turned him down.

He selected six boats for the special that would be called
America’s Deadliest Season: Alaskan Crab Fishing
. Among the captains were Phil Harris and Sig Hansen.

Getting out onto the Bering Sea, Thom again found himself at odds with the elements, but for a very different reason.

Aboard the
Fierce Allegiance,
he had struggled in a storm far fiercer than he was prepared for. This time, looking forward to footage of fishermen battling driving rain and menacing waves, he found nothing but calm seas and mild weather.

One deckhand fell overboard, and his successful rescue, caught on camera, provided the ideal drama, terrifying danger with a happy ending.

“But the rest of the material was pretty mundane,” said Thom.

That feeling was shared by the Discovery Channel hierarchy.

“This is not very good,” Thom was told. “Not much excitement. No storms.”

“I thought we were dead,” he said.

Indeed, the Discovery Channel decided to bury the show. Plans were scrapped to break the program into three one-hour specials on consecutive Sunday nights. Instead, all three hours were aired in one block on a Sunday with no advance promotion. Not even a “Coming up next . . .”

According to Thom, the attitude was “Let’s just get rid of it.”

Back in 2003, a normal Sunday night rating for the Discovery Channel was a 0.8, as in 800,000 viewers. “That show started at point eight and went up every fifteen minutes,” Thom said. “It went from eight hundred thousand to three point eight million in three hours.

“Crab fishing is made for TV, particularly when it’s shot in Alaska in the winter, because there’s very little sunlight. So it’s dark and menacing, but, for contrast, you’ve got those beautiful sodium lights beaming down on the deck. Everything’s wet, so you get that slick look. Everybody wears yellow and orange slickers that enhance the color, making the picture really vivid. It pops out at you. In the background, the Bering Sea trails off into blackness. It’s almost like the crew is on a spaceship. They know if they get off, they are dead. They are in an
extremely confined work space facing extraordinarily dangerous conditions.”