'' is a ,
2007 1 with over 80% of those deaths caused by drowning or hypothermia.
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The show was created as a regular series after two well-received prequels about
Alaskan Crabbing were produced by Thom Beers for the Discovery Channel. The first special was a documentary entitled ''The World's Deadliest Job''; the second was a three-part miniseries called ''America's Deadliest Season'', featuring one of the vessels that would later make up the regular "cast" of ''Deadliest Catch'', the ''
Northwestern ''.
''Deadliest Catch'' premiered on the
Discovery Channel on
April 12 ,
2005 . The first season had ten episodes, with the last airing on
June 14 ,
2005 . Season two was filmed one year later and began airing on
March 28 ,
2006 . Season three began airing
April 3 ,
2007 .
A four-part special, hosted by
Mike Rowe , called ''After The Catch'' began airing on
May 29 ,
2007 . The special has interviews with the captains and crews, behind the scene footage, and other footage not shown on the series. An additional behind the scenes episode aired on
June 26 ,
2007 .
The opening theme for the U.S. TV airings is "
Wanted Dead Or Alive " by
Bon Jovi , although this song is not used on the official
DVD release of the first season nor in the European version of the show. During the first two seasons of ''Deadliest Catch'', only a portion of the chorus of the song was used ("I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride/I'm wanted, wanted dead or alive") as the credits showing the ships and captains featured in that season. Season three's opening credits begin with the second half of the first verse ("Another place where the faces are so cold/I drive all night just to get back home") over nighttime footage of the fishermen working on the cold and wet decks and a night vision shot of ''
F/V Northwestern '' captain
Sig Hansen giving a side-glance to the camera, then uses the previously used portion of the song's chorus as background while credits showing the ships and captains featured in the season roll.
Commercials for Season Three shown on the Discovery Channel family of networks featured an updated and faster version of the hit
Styx song "
Come Sail Away ", performed by the punk rock cover band
Me First And The Gimme Gimmes .
In North America, the series is narrated by
Mike Rowe , while
Bill Petrie reads from the same tautological North American narrative and provides a regionally familiar accent for the English speaking viewers of the show in Europe. The show takes a unique approach to
Censoring profanities spoken by the crews, using sound effects such as a ship's horn or a burst of radio static in addition to traditional bleeping. As these sounds are part of the atmosphere's normal ambiance, it is often difficult to realize that phrases are being censored at all.
The series follows eight to ten crab fishing boats and their crews throughout two of the dangerous
Crab Fishing seasons, the October king crab (also known as "red crab") season and the January opilio crab season. The show emphasizes the danger to the crew on the decks of these boats. Each episode has a focus on a story or situation that occurs on one or more boats, with side stories on the backgrounds and particular activities of one or two crew members, in particular the "
Greenhorns " (inexperienced crew members) on several boats. The fleet's captains are featured prominently throughout the episodes, highlighting their camaraderie with their fellow captains and relationships with their crew, as well as their competitive nature against the other boats in the fleet regarding the hunt for crab throughout the fishing grounds.
Because Alaskan crab fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, the
U.S. Coast Guard rescue squads stationed at
Integrated Support Command Kodiak (
Kodiak, Alaska ) and their outpost on St. Paul Island, near the northern end of the crab fishing grounds, are frequently shown doing their own dangerous work: Rescuing crab boat crew members who fall victim to the harsh conditions on the Bering Sea. The USCG rescue squad was featured prominently during the episodes surrounding the loss of F/V ''Big Valley'' in January 2005 and the loss of F/V ''Ocean Challenger'' in October 2006.
The show has no on-air host; instead, narrators provide commentary and verbally connect the storylines as the show shifts from one crab boat to another, through a mock-up
Radar transition screen that shows the boats in relation to each other and to the two ends of the fishing grounds, St. Paul Island to the north and Dutch Harbor to the south.
Discovery Channel voice artist
Mike Rowe , who narrates the U.S. airings of the series, was originally supposed to be the on-air host as well and had appeared in taped footage as himself during the first season of shooting; as filming of the first season was nearing completion, Discovery greenlighted production on another Rowe project, ''
Dirty Jobs '', under the condition that Rowe choose only one show upon which to appear in person. As Rowe relates the story, Discovery told him that the two shows would be airing back-to-back on the same night, thus, "'we can't have you telling us stories about six dead fishermen on camera and making a fart joke with your arm in a cow's ass.'"
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The ''Behind the Scenes'' special provided insight on how the program is produced. A two-person TV crew lives on each boat profiled. They use handheld
HDV cameras to shoot most of the series (one on the main
Deck , one in the
Wheelhouse ). Additional footage is provided by four stationary cameras that are permanently mounted around the ship and are constantly recording. Shots from vantage points outside the boat are accomplished through a variety of methods, including the use of a
Helicopter (for footage near the harbor) and a cameraman on a chase boat (in season 1, the main chase boat was the ''Time Bandit''). The crew also makes use of underwater cameras, including one attached to a crab pot for a "crab's eye view" of the pot being retrieved in season 2, one mounted in the main crab tank on the ''
Northwestern '' beginning in season 2, and one mounted to a
Submersible watercraft beginning in season 3.
Because of a lack of space on the boats, the crews do not have a sound recordist. Audio is recorded using
Wireless Microphone s worn by the fishermen and
Shotgun Microphone s attached to the cameras.
Although the equipment is carefully waterproofed, the cameras are routinely damaged by
Saltwater Corrosion , ice, and accidents. By the end of each production cycle, most of the cameras (which have an average cost of $20,000 apiece) are no longer usable.
Some shots that would be difficult to capture with cameras, such as the cause of deadloss in a crab tank or the recreations of conditions for a boat capsizing, tipping, tangling on a pot line, etc., are done through
CGI . The functioning of a crab trap was shown via CGI in the second episode of the first season. The effect of an overloaded deck as an explanation for why the ''Big Valley'' sank was shown through CGI in the early episodes of season 2, while playful sea lions tearing open the ''Northwestern's'' crab pot buoys was recreated through CGI at the start of Opilio crab season during season 3.
Sig Hansen , captain of the ''
F/V Northwestern '', and Larry Hendricks, captain of the ''F/V Sea Star'', serve as technical advisors to the series' producers.
The series' first season was shot during the final year of the derby style king crab fishery. The subsequent seasons have been set after the change to a quota system as part of a process known as "rationalization". Under the old derby style, a large number of crews competed with each other to catch crab during a restrictive time window. Under the new Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) system, established owners such as those shown on the series have been given quotas which they can fill at a more relaxed pace. In theory, it is intended to be safer, which was the main rationale for the change in the fishing rules. However, the rationalization process put many crews out of work as the owners of many small boats found their assigned quotas too small to meet operating expenses; during the first season run under the IFQ system, the fleet shrank from over 250 boats to around 85 mostly larger boats with high quotas. The fishery profiled on the current series is a very small remnant of what it once was.
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The show is filmed aboard various fishing vessels, some of which change between seasons.
During filming of the first season of ''Deadliest Catch'', the F/V ''Big Valley'' sank on
January 15 ,
2005 , sometime after 0734
Alaska Standard Time when the Coast Guard first detected its
EPIRB signal. Five of the six crew perished; three were never found. Cache Seel was the only survivor. Discovery Channel film crews on the ''Maverick'' and ''Cornelia Marie'' captured the first footage of the debris field, confirming that the boat had capsized and gone down. The search for the ship is featured in the episode "Dead of Winter".
The ''Time Bandit'' can be seen in the background of the behind-the-scenes episode serving as the main chase vessel during season 1, though it is never officially identified during the season itself.
See Also: List of Deadliest Catch episodes
To date, a total of 39 episodes of ''Deadliest Catch'' have been shown, not counting the pilot series ''America's Deadliest Season'', which had three episodes. The show draws consistently high ratings for Discovery Channel, and reruns are aired frequently during weekday mornings and as part of weekend marathons.
In the U.S., the show's normal timeslot when new episodes are airing is Tuesday nights at 9PM EST5EDT, following ''Dirty Jobs''; when the season ends for ''Deadliest Catch'', ''Dirty Jobs'' takes over the 9PM timeslot. During a recent extended hiatus for ''Dirty Jobs'' in the spring of ,
2007 .:
"Look, don't get me wrong. I love ''The Deadliest Catch''. I watch the show myself. I know the captains. But enough already! If I don't get my timeslot back soon, I'm going to throw myself off this bridge..." (looks off-camera) "...what?" (title card with "Dirty Jobs Is Back" in white print against sludge-colored background) "Really?" (card stays for a second longer, then smash-cut back to Rowe in his bridge painter's uniform doing a victory dance) "Cool! I got my timeslot back...I got my timeslot back...my old timeslot back...''Dirty Jobs'' on Tuesdays...oh, yeah..."
''Deadliest Catch'' was nominated for four ,
2007 .
