A new television show in the hard, dirty men doing hard, dirty work genre premieres tonight on the Spike network. The show, called Coal, follows a company of West Virginia miners as they face the dangers of their work. A description from Spike’s website:
Every aspect of the job will be covered, from the dangers behind the super-charged explosions needed to open surface mines, to the well-publicized daily dangers of working in the dark recesses of the earth's crust in a traditional shaft mine. As they face the daily pressure to keep the mine up and running and their workers safe, family men Crowder and Roberts will rely on the support of their loved ones to tackle the mine's daily demands.
And their trailer:
Certainly looks like the makings of great television. Drama, daring, dirt. And the very real threat of serious danger to men you can't help but like. The show is laced with human interest, with its focus on the miner’s lives and families, but that danger is really the hook. The show’s marketing material is full of miners matter-of-factly explaining that they’ll die in that tunnel, and with mine collapses ever-present in the news it’s hard not to take them at their word.
That threat of danger is what’s driven the success of shows like Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Ax Men, all also from the creators of Coal. In a smart piece earlier this week Dana Jennings remarked on the vaguely educational promise of these shows (some of them run on the History channel), and also on the rarity of seeing and hearing working class men discuss their difficult lives on television. But, as Jennings notes, the men on these shows “end up as commodified as the natural resources that control their destinies.”
It’s an interesting take, as Jennings notes that the featured miners apparently aren’t paid for their appearance in the series. Which isn’t to say they don’t benefit from the exposure. They are men who clearly take rightful pride in their work, and we shouldn’t discount the ability of this type of theater to bolster it. But given the countless number of miners whose lives have been taken by our unending need for energy, it’s more than a little unsettling to have their days now offered as vicarious thrills for our Wednesday nights.
One of the interesting things about this show as compared to its brethren is that it’s putting a new spotlight on an enterprise that has been around for centuries. One could argue that the other hits of the genre depict labor in nooks created by relatively recent developments in globalization and environmental plundering. For example, Deadliest Catch, by far the most popular of these shows, depicts fishermen braving extreme conditions to catch Alaskan king crab. It’s been our general overfishing and the still relatively recent conception of “fresh” (Susanne Freidberg has a great book on the topic), that have enabled the huge paydays that make this incredibly dangerous work attractive. We didn’t used to have the global market or the means to transport these crabs. Now we do, and so we have the dangerous work, and so we have the show. Ax Men, another hit, focuses on loggers whose work is made perilous by the remote locations of remaining forests and the speed at which the men are compelled to work to make profits. Logging has always been risky business, to be sure, but environmental and market forces make it much more so now.
Coal mining, though, has always been extremely dangerous work, and, judging from Coal’s promos, the addition of modern machinery really hasn’t lessened the danger all that much. Historically, coal mining was so dangerous and yet so profitable that it was a common flashpoint for early twentieth century labor disputes. John Sayles’ Matewan is a terrific film depicting a real-life attempt to unionize by coal miners in 1920 in West Virginia, not far from where Coal is filmed.
Another strike by coal miners was the subject of Thomas G. Andrews’s Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the coveted Bancroft Prize in 2009. Andrews revisits what’s known as the “Ludlow Massacre,” a bloody standoff between miners attempting to organize and goons brought in by the mine operators to stand in their way. Should Coal pique your interest in the history of mining, there’s no better resource than Killing for Coal, with its depiction of coal mining’s centrality to the industrial revolution. Andrews meant his book to unveil coal’s role in everything from economic growth to social inequality, and he’s been widely praised for having succeeded.
As Andrews remarked in a conversation a couple of years back, his underlying goal was to have readers ask harder questions about where their energy comes from, and who suffers as a consequence. Now, in the face of Coal, perhaps the book can help us to ask the same questions about our entertainment.
