Image Credit: Spike TV; Discovery Channel

Thom Beers, exec producer of Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Ax Men, is known for being the king of the dangerous job genre of reality TV. Without that reputation for delivering quality, guilt-free Testosterone TV (something he’ll speak about at next month’s NAB Show in Las Vegas), his latest docu-series, Spike Coal‘s, premiering March 30, may never have happened. It took Beers four years to find the right coal mine to turn his cameras on: He needed a company willing to trust that he would show what working underground is really like (that’s where his credits came in handy), and he needed the stakes to be high. “We’ve learned over the years that you can’t get into a big corporation. To make these shows really work, you gotta ache with these people. You’ve got to feel for them,” he says. He settled on Cobalt Coal, located in Big Sandy, WV, co-owned by Tom Roberts and Mike Crowder. (For Justified fans, the shared last name Crowder is “just a nice touch,” Beers says.) These two have their own money in the business, and they’re struggling to keep it afloat. “Every week, you want to be saying, ‘are they gonna make payroll?’, and it’s real. That authenticity is the key to this. We’re not scripting these shows. The whole idea is to find the right set of circumstances, which is why it took four years. Then you have to add on the special sauce, which is the spice — the characters. You gotta look and say, ‘Can these guys carry a story? Are they interesting characters?’”  READ FULL STORY »