Farewell Phil Harris.
Tonight the Discovery Channel will air a two-hour special dedicated to the life and times of Cornelia Marie Captain Phil Harris who died of a stroke earlier this year.
Harris was hard living and hard charging. He was overweight, he chain smoked by his own admission he did “every drug you could imagine.” He died at age 53 after suffering a massive stroke while off-loading his boat at St. Paul Harbor in the Bering Sea. They tried to save him with surgery, but it was not to be.
Earlier this season Captain Phil predicted his fate, “I’m not gonna be here for very much longer, that’s a fact, I’m not.”
Other than gender and age, I have little in common with Phil Harris. I grew up in the comfortable suburbs of Los Angeles where my biggest concern was whether the Dodgers would win the Pennant, not how to crush through an ice sheet 4 feet thick to drop pots into the frozen deep of the North Pacific in the hopes that a few opilio crab would wander into the trap. Oh, and if they didn’t then you may not eat for the next few months until the king crab season.
Phil Harris was an ordinary man doing extraordinary things. He was a star on a show that has taken the Discovery Channel to the stratosphere with TV ratings.
Here’s why Deadliest Catch works so well, it’s a reality show that is actually real. These guys would be the same whether the cameras were there, or not. I liked the The Osbourns on MTV because you knew that Ozzie had no idea the cameras were even there. Also, it’s one of the few TV shows out there for men.
Think of what ABC did a few years back when they made the move to female programming. Grey’s Anatomy, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Desperate Housewives and on and on. It’s worked very well for them as far as ratings go, they found the female viewer. This is a direction the networks have been going for years and they show no sign of slowing down.
Perhaps part of the reason guys like Deadliest Catch so much is that it’s antithetical to what the networks are dishing in prime time.
The stars of the show smoke, drink, scream and swear. They have tattoos. They talk about women in politically incorrect ways. They dangerously light fireworks off the Time Bandit. They harass “greenhorns.” Surviving on those boats is something men would like to do if they were able, but they know they can’t (the NFL has the same appeal). This is a reality show that is actually real. At the end of the crabbing season they meet in a bar and do more politically incorrect things that would repulse desperate housewives.
I’ve not missed an episode of Deadliest Catch since the show began in 2005. I’ll be watching again tonight. I’ll Tivo this episode and watch it a few times, then the next time I cruise the Caribbean I’ll sit in the comfort of a Stateroom, I’ll see if I can actually feel the ship move, order king crab, and think of Phil Harris.