Fitzy O'Hare's Wasilla Homehunter Blog: December 2010

By Tom Conroy, Media Life Magazine
Dec 2, 2010

In the reality-TV genre that covers manly men doing dangerous jobs, we viewers know that although the ice-road truckers or crab fishermen may be risking injury and even death, at least they’re getting paid well.

Discovery’s new series “Gold Rush: Alaska” shows us a bunch of miners dealing not only with hazardous equipment and prowling bears but also the possibility that they may not earn any money at all. In fact, the father-son team leading the camp may lose their life savings.

While the characters and action on the show are interesting enough, the boom-or-bust question gives the series a compelling story arc that should keep viewers coming back for more. The recession angle is a plus.

In the premiere episode, airing this Friday, Dec. 3, at 10 p.m., we meet Jack Hoffman, who with his son Todd runs a small airport in Oregon. Their business has taken a hit in the recent economic turmoil, which also has sent the price of gold skyrocketing, so they decide to sell everything, invest $150,000 in mining equipment and go work a claim in Alaska.

They gather a crew of four newbies who are also suffering from hard times and  have agreed to work for nothing unless the enterprise hits pay dirt. Three of them have some experience with heavy machinery, the exception being Jimmy Dorsey, who until recently worked in the quintessential pre-recession field, real estate.

The other guys lose some viewer sympathy by constantly blaming Jimmy for everything that goes wrong or warning him not to screw up.

The premiere starts slowly, with perhaps too much time spent showing us how the group gets the earth-moving equipment from Oregon to Alaska. The narrator makes much of the possibility that they might miss the weekly barge that goes from Seattle to a port in Alaska. In fact, the grim narration makes every obstacle, no matter how trivial, feel like a potential disaster.

Later, when they can’t cross a rickety bridge in Alaska with their big backhoe, they’re forced to ford the river upstream. Here, the action is genuinely suspenseful.

Other moments could just as easily been played for comedy, which would be a relief every now and then. Jack, who mined for gold in Alaska 30 years ago, is impatient and refuses to listen to the others. At one point he drives the backhoe into his truck. And rather than dig where small amounts of gold are likely to be found, he insists on randomly searching for what the miners call “glory holes”: big deposits at the bottom of buried ancient waterfalls.

Jack could have been cast in an old Hollywood movie as a prospector. The other guys are a little less telegenic, but they’re easy to root for, especially when, in the second episode, the local black bears and grizzlies start moving closer to the camp.

At the end of that second episode, the future of the project is still unclear, but it’s likely many viewers will keep watching the series to see how things pan out.