How would you define the hardest jobs in America? If you’re NBC and trying to create a nail-biting reality contest, “America’s Toughest Jobs,” you look for jobs as far removed from a safe little cubicle as you can get. For example, there’s crab fishing in 20-foot waves in the dead of night in the Bering Sea. Or truck driving 18-wheelers through white-outs and over black ice above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Or bridge maintenance on L.A.’s Vincent Thomas Bridge, thirty-eight stories high. Creator and executive producer Thom Beers has spent the last two decades filming these death-defying jobs for documentaries, most notably for the Discovery Channel (“Deadliest Catch”). Now he’s bundled these white-knuckle occupations into a winner-take-all, 10-week marathon for the 13 contestants who clearly weren’t getting enough stimulation from their morning Starbucks. The last one standing walks away with the combined yearly salaries from all nine jobs, or roughly $250,000.”The hardest job was definitely crab fishing,” says Beers. “Out there, it’s 20 degrees on the Bering Sea. It’s pitch black. There’s ice underneath your feet on the deck, 700-pound crab pots (enormous cages) above you and water that’s 32 degrees. If you go in it, you’re dead in three minutes. I’d say that’s a job from hell.” Like CBS’s “Survivor,” “Toughest Jobs” is visually stunning. But on this show, there is no need to manufacture the challenges. The challenge is to survive one day on each of these jobs – two if you’re unlucky enough to have screwed it up the first day and be judged lacking by the people who perform these tasks for a living. Take Amy Brodsky, a 40-year-old Wall Street executive who flailed around on the crab-fishing boat deck like a just-caught fish. She couldn’t haul a rope. She couldn’t toss a line with a spike at the end to retrieve the pots. She couldn’t take direction from the boat captain who warned her, repeatedly, not to sit on top of the crab pot – the quickest way to be washed overboard and drown. She couldn’t even help in the kitchen, because she doesn’t cook. So she struggled making grilled cheese sandwiches for her exhausted teammates. “I turned my stove off in New York,” she says. “I store books in it.” Cynics may assume that Beers and company only went after nine-to-fivers, sedentary types such as Brodsky with the least ability to stand up to these rigorous tasks. “But that would’ve been too easy,” he says. “I didn’t want a dozen computer programmers.” Instead, the contestants, ages 22-52, run the gamut from sculptor to carpenter to pharmaceutical sales rep. All they had to have was a yen for adventure – and pass the physical. The biggest surprise? They all survived. “And the women kicked serious ass,” says Beers.Even so, it’s terrifying to watch the conestants in action. On some jobs, like the truck driving, there are several days of training required because of the contestants have to get special licenses. But on others, like the crab fishing, there’s about an hour of information, and then they’re put to work. Stand in the wrong place, as several contestants do, and you can get tangled up in a rope, one step short of being pulled into the frigid waters.
“Wait until you see the bull fighting at the rodeo,” says Beers, who included the job of rodeo clown, the guys who distract the bulls after the riders have been dumped. “Oh my God, it was carnage,” he says. “People walked away from that episode with dislocated knees, dislocated shoulders, a broken leg, a broken finger – just running and jiving to get out of the way.”Beers himself broke two ribs on the logging job when he tried to check out a fallen tree that looked unstable and dangerous. When the tree started shaking and he tried to jump off, his spiked boot got stuck and he twisted and fell eight feet onto another log. “It was pretty gnarly,” he says.
AMERICA’S TOUGHEST JOBS
Monday, 9 p.m., NBC