Text size:

On TV: Roughnecks getting dirty in 'Black Gold'

Verne Gay | Off Camera

June 18, 2008

BLACK GOLD

Tonight at 10, TruTV

Reason to watch: Thom Beers ("Ice Road Truckers," "Deadliest Catch," et al) strikes yet again. He's TV's most accomplished producer of the burgeoning world's-toughest-jobs reality format.

What it's about: Black gold, Texas tea . . . (And no jokes about "The Beverly Hillbillies" will be inserted at this point; promise.) It's the stuff of legend, of booms and busts, of men so tough and gritty that they pour dirt on their morning cereal, just for flavor. They're roughnecks who pile-drive drills two miles into the ground in the hope that something black and immensely valuable is at the other end, and more often than not, ain't.

Verne Gay Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

In this series, we follow three crews on three platforms, Big Dog, Longhorn and Viking, as they race against the clock to strike Texas crude, but they have to negotiate on-the-job dangers (whipsaw chains; 10,000-pound drill blocks) and off-the-job ones as well (usually in the form of well-lubricated nights at the local watering holes).

They've also got bosses from hell to worry about, or at least Gerald on the Longhorn qualifies as such. He's a profane, stubbled Daniel Plainview type from "There Will Be Blood." Any minute, you expect him to say, "My straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake. . . ." He doesn't, but he spouts enough epithets to keep the beeper man back in the TV edit room on full alert. Man, it's a filthy show, too - dirt and mud and slop everywhere.

Bottom line: Another winner. Beers has a formula, but he wrote the darn thing, so he's allowed to recycle it over and over, as far as I'm concerned. This show jumps right off the screen into your living room - full of life, vigor and pure raw energy. Beers and crew bring us right into a vital part of our world, and make us viscerally understand it. Plus, "Black Gold" is great to look at, mud aside. It's set in the gorgeous pancake-flat West Texas landscape, where as far as the eye can see is scrub and creosote bush. Great thunderheads drift across this primal landscape, as the viewer is left with a sense that something terribly elemental and central to the human spirit is unfolding.

NAME DROPPING

TruTV is the new name for Court TV. It's one of several cable channels that have recently changed their names:

Then Discovery Home

Now Planet Green

Then Discovery Times

Now ID

Then History Channel

Now History

Then Fox Sports New York

Now MSG