Dirty Jobs

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Dirty Jobs
Dirty Jobs logo
Genre	Reality television
Starring	Mike Rowe
Country of origin	USA
No. of episodes	54 (List of episodes)
Production
Running time	60 Minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	Discovery Channel
Original run	November 7, 2003 – present
Links
IMDb profile

Dirty Jobs is a program on the Discovery Channel in which host Mike Rowe is shown performing difficult and/or messy occupational duties alongside professional workers. The show premiered with three pilot episodes in November 2003. The show returned as a series on July 26, 2005.

The appeal of the show is the juxtaposition of Mike Rowe, a well-spoken man of television with a sharp, sarcastic, self-deprecating wit, the blue-collar situations in which he's put, and the colorful personalities of the men and women who actually do that job for a living.

A worker takes on Rowe as a fully-involved assistant during a typical work day, during which he works hard to complete every task as best he can despite discomfort, hazards or situations that are just plain disgusting. The "dirty job" often includes cameramen Troy Paff or Doug Glover getting just as dirty as he does.

Mike Rowe often makes jokes about his jobs and describes them as "dirty jokes." But he almost never makes fun of the workers themselves. Indeed, Rowe and the show consistently respect these people for taking on the jobs that average people would never touch, and the show always begins with the following quote from Mike Rowe:

"I explore the country looking for people who aren't afraid to get dirty—hard-working men and women who earn an honest living doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us."

Upon learning that a worker has teenage children, Rowe sometimes directs comments at them through the camera, such as, "This is what your Mom does every day, just to keep a roof over your heads!"

1 History
2 Episodes
- 2.1 "Too Gross for Discovery"
3 Promotion
4 Music
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

The show is a spin-off of a segment host Mike Rowe once did on a local San Francisco program called Somebody's Gotta Do It. After completing a graphic piece on artificial cow insemination, Rowe was inundated with letters expressing "shock, horror, fascination, disbelief, and wonder". Rowe then sent the tape to the Discovery Channel, who commissioned a series based on this concept ^[1]. Dirty Jobs is now produced by Craig Piligian (executive producer) of Pilgrim Film & Television. The Discovery Channel executive producer is Gena McCarthy.

Rowe raking mud on a Hawaiian Taro farm.

[edit] Episodes

Main article: List of Dirty Jobs episodes

In July 2006, the show aired two special episodes to kick off and wrap up Discovery's annual Shark Week, of which Mike Rowe was the host. The episodes featured him in a number of jobs related to the animals, some as outlandish as shark repellent tester and shark suit tester, both of which necessitated his jumping into a shark feeding frenzy. As a pun on Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" theme, the two episodes were named "Dirty Jobs That Bite" and "Dirty Jobs That Bite Harder" for the opening and closing hours respectively.

In late August of 2006, the show reached a milestone with Mike Rowe's 100th dirty job. This was commemorated with a special 2 hour long episode which mainly showed Mike's day with the U.S. Army's 187th Ordnance Battalion at Fort Jackson, and included bloopers plus an "about me" segment of Mike's crew. At the end of the episode, Mike Rowe and Dave Barsky had a guitar/banjo duet and performed a song about the 100 dirty jobs.

[edit] "Too Gross for Discovery"

According to roadkill taxidermy artist Stephen Paternite, Dirty Jobs filmed a segment featuring him in 2003, which was ultimately cut by the Discovery Channel as "too gross." The segment follows Mike Rowe and Paternite as they gather and skin dead raccoons, which Paternite will eventually turn into art pieces. The segment is available as a DVD for sale on Paternite's website, and on YouTube, under the name "Too Gross for Discovery."^[2]

[edit] Promotion

Discovery Channel issued the following statement in its publicity of the program:

In the feisty Dirty Jobs, host and everyman Mike Rowe gets the grimy scoop on downright nasty occupations. The featured "foul play for pay" could be processing smelly seafood in a fish factory, collecting bat guano for prized fertilizer, combing creek bottoms for edible wildlife, or cleaning septic tanks to maintain a fresh-smelling environment.

[edit] Music

The show's theme song was originally Faith No More's "We Care A Lot" which features the lyrics, "It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it." As of March 2007, it has been replaced with a generic theme song due to rights issues; all older episode introductions have been redone to use the new song. Mike Rowe has said "Bottom line, the rights to We Care a Lot were either not renewed on time, or not properly acquired in the first place." ^[3]

During segues into commercial breaks, the song Dirty White Boy by Foreigner is played.

When Mike reads the very last piece of viewer mail in the viewer's choice episode, he was asked if he could sing the Dirty Jobs Theme Song because his online bio says that he used to be an opera singer. So he explained that one night, as they sat on "Foley" Creek (actually "Folly" Creek, but he has a tendency to pronounce it incorrectly), after a night of oysters and drinking (likely during the Oyster Harvester segment of the shrimper episode), he, Juke Joint Johnny and Sam (likely Silky Sam) jotted down some lyrics and the "official, unofficial Dirty Jobs Theme Song" was born. This shortest version of the song clocked in at just under a minute in length, and it varies a bit from later versions, but it is fun in that it was less planned than the later ones ^[4].

At the end of the pipe organ specialist segment of the geoduck farmer episode, Mike Rowe sang what he called the Dirty Jobs Anthem ^[5].

At the conclusion of a two-hour special edition commemorating Mike's 100th dirty job, he and field producer Dave Barsky faked a guitar/banjo duet, featuring an extended version of this anthem which ran a little over two minutes in length (Rowe actually sang all the parts while Rowe's friend Matt played all the instruments) ^[6].

The extended song differs slightly from the shorter versions which aired previously, and even the words that are similar vary somewhat ^[7].

In a 2007 episode set at Prince George's Stadium with Mike spending the day doing the "dirty jobs" associated with groundskeeping and dugout maintenance for the Bowie Baysox minor league baseball team in Bowie, Maryland, Mike ended the segment singing the National Anthem prior to the game and throwing out the first pitch.