Rugged, grizzled men bringing testosterone back

I know next to nothing about Thom Beers. But in my head, the veteran producer sweats motor oil, gargles with lava and only goes to the Gap to leer at the salesgirls.

After years of TV being overrun by metrosexuals and watered-down heroes, Beers is almost single-handedly bringing real men back to prime time.

"Deadliest Catch." "Ax Men." "Ice Road Truckers." Each series follows rugged men as they go about their rugged jobs, and together, they offer more testosterone than a thousand whipped sitcom husbands.

And Beers isn't done. His patented men-at-work formula soon will include something called "Shark Taggers." And, really, how do you top that? "Grizzly Punchers"? "Lion Squeezers"?

I just hope this escalation of most-dangerous-jobs shows ends before it comes to the series no one wants: " 'Rock of Love' Gynecologist."

But back to the current shows.

The specter of death hangs over "Ax Men" (10 p.m. Sundays, History) like it's Artie Lange.

The series, which follows four logging crews in the mountains of Oregon, trips all over itself to point out how dangerous the occupation is. Logging has a fatality rate 22 times the national average. One out of every thousand workers dies each year. A thousand loggers have been killed in the United States in the past decade.

"That's the problem with what we do: You never know how you're going to get killed," Gustafson Logging site boss Darrell Holthusen says early on. "You might get killed on the way to work, you might get killed at work, or you might get killed on the way home."

And if the trees and equipment don't kill the loggers, they'll settle for taking pieces of the men.

"I've sacrificed that body part," J.M. Browning Logging owner Jay Browning says, nonchalantly, about his mostly torn-off hand. "Almost lost my foot when my prosthesis broke running a chain saw one day. I've been hit in the head with a choker belt and split my skull pretty much in half. So I've paid my dues."

"Ax Men" -- not to be confused with the horny frat guys selling body spray on TV -- follows a cross-section of companies in search of what narrator Beers awkwardly refers to as "green gold." Browning's money's-no-object approach flies in the face of Stump Branch Logging, whose third-hand equipment runs on elbow grease and wishes, and Pihl Logging, which is on the verge of turning off its saws for good because of the housing slowdown.

But the one thing all four companies have in common is characters, in the realest sense of the word. The kind of crusty, no-nonsense men you rarely see outside of newsreels about the Civilian Conservation Corps. The kind you just know would die a little inside if they ever stopped to consider how much of that wood they're risking their lives for goes to chronicling the latest exploits of the Spears family.

Take that same grizzled breed of man, ship a couple of dozen of them to the frozen Bering Sea, and you've got "Deadliest Catch" (9 p.m. Tuesdays, Discovery Channel).

The fourth season of the perilous crab-fishing series kicks off with The Wizard being tossed about by a 40-foot rogue wave that tears a hole in the ship's steel hull. Within seconds -- and by showing rather than telling -- the series feels far more harrowing than pretty much anything "Ax Men" can muster.

Part of "Deadliest Catch's" energy stems from the fact that unlike the logging crews, the boats are in direct competition with each other. And while those trees have been anchored to the same ground for more than 80 years, the crabs are constantly moving, and there's no way of knowing where they are until the 800-pound pots used to catch them are hauled back on deck.

Maybe it's because they've had more time in front of the cameras, but the men of "Deadliest Catch" also seem to have more personality.

Sig Hansen, the Northwestern's Gary Busey-esque captain, has become something of a mainstream celebrity.

Captain Johnathan Harris and the Time Bandit crew continue the show's prank wars by replacing one of the Cornelia Marie's crab pots with a rusted-out pickup.

And by the time Cornelia Marie captain Phil Harris discovers his crew-member son has charged a flat-screen TV to the company credit card, threatens his offspring with all sorts of bodily harm, and tells the camera "Now you know why lions eat their young," his scenes play out like outtakes from a "Home Improvement"-style comedy.

Leave it to Beers to create a whole new rugged prototype: the sitcom husband who's more likely to whip than be whipped.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.