Television

"Our blood runs about a thousand miles an hour – you ready?"

This line comes from:

A. A wrestling match.

B. An action movie.

C. A reality show.

D. A PBS documentary.

You know how this works. It's gotta be D. It gets growled during this week's 10-hour public-TV miniseries Carrier by one of the U.S.S. Nimitz crew with whom filmmakers spent six months embedded during the aircraft carrier's deployment to Iraq. (It begins at 8 tonight on KERA-TV.)

But C wouldn't have been a bad bet, either. Reality has splintered now into a half-dozen subgenres. Competitions. Makeovers. Dating shows. Celebreality. Docusoaps.

And, suddenly, the hottest of them all – high-stakes high-tension actioners. Ordinary men battling the unforgiving forces of nature.

Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men are colossal cable hits, filmed like documentaries, on unforgiving landscapes, then edited into high-velocity character sagas, like edgy Westerns for a new generation. They're posting huge ratings among men at a time the broadcast networks lean toward Grey's Anatomy female appeal.

So now those same networks want into the game. NBC just announced two unscripted actioners for next season – America's Toughest Jobs and Shark Taggers – and even public TV is going for the gusto.

Carrier dispenses with narration, employing a bluesy theme song and a rock/country/hip-hop soundtrack, along with quick-cut visuals and first-person testimony: "If I don't do what I do and a wire snaps, I get chopped in half."

Just don't call these "reality" shows. "We're not in the business of 'reality,' " insists Nancy Dubuc, executive vice president and general manager of History, which recently streamlined its name by dropping "channel." Its preferred term for such hits as Ax Men is "verite documentary," Ms. Dubuc says, because they depict "what these men do every day to make history."

No mushy romance or talk-talk-talk here. These guys DO. They ACT. They are MEN.

"I tell you what. This is the thing," begins the adrenaline rush that is Thom Beers, kingpin producer of the genre. With hits such as Discovery's Deadliest Catch (that channel's highest-rated series) and History's Truckers (ditto), with 14 series now in the works across nine channels, he adds, "Action movies have gone away. What are we looking at in the world of men? Big corporate leaders out there making $30 million in stock options and bonuses when their company's tanking and the common man is taking it in the shorts? So who's our hero?"

He's the working stiff taking out his crab boat, knowing he might die, might pummel his grating crewmates, or might land a big-money catch. He's the trucker steering his 18-wheeler over frozen lakes. He's the pest-slayer of Verminators, Mr. Beers' newest Discovery series. "We're responding to a culture that wants to hear it from the source, not from some 'expert,' " says History's Ms. Dubuc.

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