Ice Road Truckers!

The other night I decided to watch some TV on Hulu.  I’d already watched Hulu’s first suggestion, Conan O’Brian’s debut on The Tonight Show, so I clicked on the second show that scrolled by: “Ice Road Truckers.”

 

The beginning of the show shocked me.  It started out by saying something like “last season these truckers drove their rigs across the thin ice of a frozen river.  This season they’ll be driving across… THE OCEAN!!!”  My immediate thought was “do they need to be driving across the ocean?  Are they doing this solely for the purpose of the show, or for some commercial endeavor?  Is this some sort of to-the-death contest, because I thought it was a documentary-type reality show?”  Maybe if I had watched season one I’d have known the answers to these questions, but for a first time viewer it seemed odd that a bunch of truckers would suddenly need to drive across the frozen Artic Ocean and that that need would conveniently correspond with the schedule of a TV show. 

 

The next few minutes provided more surprises, as well as some answers.  Apparently, the truckers were taking gear to a natural gas exploration post.  They were also veteran drivers who seemed to have been featured in season one, and who had decided to seek employment with this new company.  So it wasn’t some sort of daredevil contest.  The show also had some really cool visuals, like shots from beneath the ice and footage of lonely trucks completely isolated in the desolation and perpetual twilight of the Artic.  I can only imagine the difficulty of filming video like that.  It was also interesting to learn about how ice roads are built, which information was inter-cut with human-interest vignettes about worried family members.  The show was overly dramatic to the point of sensationalism, but the profession itself came across as authentically dangerous; apparently the ice cracks and changes all the time as plows and trucks drive over it. 

 

One thing that surprised me, however, was the absurdly simplistic premise that the show sets up: “brave men” fighting the elements in their effort accomplish a heroic task.  As I watched I couldn’t help but be flooded with a number of questions about what was really going on.  I don’t know much about natural gas mining, but I was left to wonder if “global energy exploration” is a hands-down positive thing?  The show certainly didn’t address that issue.  I also wondered what sort of impact this type of profession had on their families.  The show dealt with that briefly, but only as a method of raising the suspense later on.  (The producers asked family members if they were scared the truckers would fall through the ice, which they were, which then made me scared when I later watched them driving.)

 

What surprised me even more was that despite the show’s premise, many of the characters didn’t come off as ordinary working-class heroes.  While some were amiable enough, others were petulant or downright annoying.  In this way there was constant tension between the show’s writing, which tried to show brave men in dangerous places, and the reality of the situation, which included real people and complex relationships. 

 

In the end “Ice Road Truckers” is an interesting show with visuals that can’t help but raise questions about isolation and solitude.  Unfortunately, that aspect is often lost in the muck of mediocre producing and an unrealistically (an uninteresting) positive attitude.  In being purely focused on the drama of the profession the show ignored larger (more interesting) questions about the community, professional, and environmental impact of the job.