Jill Greenberg
After he left QVC for good in 1993, Rowe committed himself to a life of intermittent work punctuated with a lot of fun. The gigs were occasionally amazing. American Airlines, for example, hired him to create and host a series of short travel spots, which aired on its planes. "Basically, they gave me a crew, and free rein to fly anywhere the airline went for a year," says Rowe. But it was on the set of Your New Home that he honed his most valuable Dirty Jobs skill: getting regular people to go on TV and discuss what they do all day. A talk show set in the Baltimore area, it was sponsored by local builders trying to move residential units during the real-estate crunch of the early 1990s. Rowe's role was to interview the salespeople. ("One woman was so nervous, she threw up in her hands," he says.) It was low on glamour, but he spent an astonishing 14 years at it. For a while, he was even getting paid in condos. "I got the idea that they could pay me in model homes, rather than money," he says a little sheepishly. "I'm not acquisitive by nature." In fact, to this day, Rowe rents his San Francisco apartment, and his only current real-estate holding is a condo he bought for his parents six years ago. "I'm just not into owning things."
After years of defining work as the thing that happens between vacations, Rowe caught himself by surprise. "I was cohosting the local Evening Magazine on CBS-5 in San Francisco, and did a segment called 'Somebody's Gotta Do It.'" The viewers loved it. So did he. Somewhere deep inside him, a kind of quest was taking shape. At CBS, he created a pilot of the segment and shopped it around as a stand-alone property. He offered it to Discovery twice. They passed twice. The feedback: "Mike, it's a talk show in a sewer."
That's when Rowe brought the tape to Piligian, the American Chopper producer. Rowe had worked with Piligian once before, on a 22-episode reality series called Worst Case Scenario, where Rowe was the in-studio host. Piligian saw the potential and brought Rowe's tape to his Discovery contact, Shawn Gallagher. "I knew immediately it could work," Gallagher remembers.
And it did, eventually. After a 3-episode pilot series in November 2003, Discovery ordered up 10 more, which started airing in July 2005. Rowe, who had signed on to host Deadliest Catch, an established franchise, jumped ship when the call came in to renew Dirty Jobs. The show quickly became a viewer favorite and the channel ordered 18 more new shows, then in late 2006, another 30. Fans can expect at least 24 new episodes to start airing in 2008.
Technically a weekly show, Dirty Jobs has been in heavy rotation since 2005, an industry tactic called "looping." According to Abby Greensfelder, former head of programming and development, it was part of a strategy to create signature series--and personalities--for a network known only for its specials. The Discovery Channel's ratings had been taking a hit for some time, and Greensfelder saw value in having faces and titles that could become the "connective tissue that drove repeat viewing. And Mike was the perfect Discovery guy." Frequent airings created a rising tide that lifted both Rowe and Discovery. It also kept the programming pipeline full, giving the network time to devote to specials, as with the Emmy Award-winning 2007 miniseries Planet Earth, which was five years in development.
Rowe began to feel a certain paternal pride in Dirty Jobs. "I'd always had a LMNO philosophy on things--leave my name off," he says. This was different. So Rowe went to the network with his original reel and asked to be acknowledged, winning a rare "based on a concept by" credit. "It mattered to me," he says simply.
As the realization set in that, somehow, he had stumbled onto a new sense of purpose, Rowe slowly began to understand where it had taken root. Growing up in a rural Baltimore exurb ("real Huck Finn stuff"), he'd watched his grandfather, whom he adored, live the perfect dirty life. "Every day of my childhood," he says, "my grandfather was building a barn, putting on an addition, putting in a sewer line, pouring concrete." He even designed the local church, without a blueprint. And while Rowe wasn't a particularly handy kid ("Nope, no manual skills, really," says his mom, Peggy), that memory has come to fill him with a rare--and forgivable-- earnestness. "All of my earliest memories involve my grandfather fixing something, usually starting very clean and ending up very dirty, with the problem solved and a lot of yelling and laughing in between." Rowe pauses. "This is really about him."
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Recent Comments | 12 Total
February 8, 2008 at 11:00am by Robert Safian
Mike Rowe is appearing at the Border's bookstore in Westwood California tomorrow, Feb 9, at 1pm to sign copies of the magazine and of the new Dirty Jobs DVD. All are welcome!
February 12, 2008 at 7:26pm by Andrew Wilson
Good article. Fascinating character morphed out of a seemingly ordinary lad.