Ax Appeal
In the old days when people still read, the New Yorker and a few other general-interest magazines used to publish 80,000 word articles on, say, the grain industry. This, of course, is one reason people don't read anymore, and yet, in the hands of the right author, those lengthy illuminations of emerging soybean technologies and the impact migratory geese can have on a wheat farmer's bottom line can be fascinating.
While magazines have largely abandoned such fare, cable TV has stepped in to fill the void. Instead of 80,000 word features, it offers reality series like Ice Road Truckers, The Deadliest Catch, and Lobster Wars, all of which document various arcane, high-risk, high-testosterone industries that have not yet been outsourced to China. The latest to hit the airwaves is the History Channel's Ax Men, which profiles four crews of loggers extracting "green gold" from the forests of Oregon.
In the 1990s, a series of videotapes that consisted of little more than vehicles in action -- There Goes a Firetruck, There Goes a Police Car -- was a huge hit amongst three-year-old boys. These new reality series are essentially the adult equivalents. In Ax Men, we're introduced to a crane-like vehicle called a yarder, and a yarder-like vehicle called a yoder -- and most of the first episode consists of footage showing how the loggers use the vehicles to pull huge felled trees up steep hillsides to waiting trucks.
For loggers, the forest's greatest natural resource is wood. For reality TV producers, it's danger. At any moment, a towing cable can snap and sever a leg, a yarder can tumble and crush a torso, a chainsaw can slip and slice a finger. One of the loggers featured on Ax Men has a high-tech hook instead of a hand; others recount the various injuries they've suffered over the years. You can easily get killed on the way to work, one man explains. And at work. And on the way home. "Everything out here can kill you," he concludes.
Ax Men's unseen narrator picks up on this conceit and, like a melodramatic woodpecker, hammers at it relentlessly; ultimately, his attempts to sustain a sense of imminent catastrophe undermine the show. It's as if the producers trust neither their material nor their audience -- apparently they think we'll lose interest unless there's a chance we'll soon be seeing some horror-movie gore.
As the show restlessly jumps from one logging crew to the next in search of action, or at least the promise of action, the rhythms of the day and the relationships between the crew-members get short shrift. Instead of letting drama grow naturally, organically, as old-school documentarians might, Ax Men's creators try to manufacture artificially, in typical reality TV style. Like the loggers they're profiling, who seem to have a fair amount of time in between tense moments to smoke cigarettes and contemplate their next move, Ax Men's producers and especially its narrator should take a break now and then and just let their material speak for itself -- as it is, they're working far too hard to entertain us.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]