14
ON THE SCREEN
JANUARY 19�26, 2022
WHAT TO WATCH WHEN
YOU’RE STAYING HOME
Mike Rowe ready to shine light on more ‘Dirty Jobs’
By Luaine Lee
Tribune News Service
A
t last Mike Rowe, the genial
host of the series “Dirty
Jobs,” comes clean. And though
he seems suited to the role,
hosting a TV show was never on
his clipboard.
When he was 19, he says, he
looked to his future “and saw
nothing but a void, a dark void.
I thought, ‘I can’t even imagine
myself with a wife and kids. I
can’t imagine myself without
a wife and kids. I can’t imagine
getting a steady paycheck. I
can’t imagine working for any-
body who would give me one.
I can’t imagine wanting one.’ I
couldn’t imagine ANY scenario
for happiness.”
It was right after graduating
that he began to panic. “I can’t
remember a moment when I
was more unsettled than when
School of Humans/Discovery/TNS
Mike Rowe fi nds himself inside an escalator pit in the new version of “Dirty
Jobs,” which premiered on the Discovery Channel Jan. 2, 2022.
I fi nished high school and had
absolutely no idea what to do, no
idea,” he says.
“I was so lucky to have par-
ents who said, ‘Look, we don’t
care. As long as you stay curi-
ous, as long as you work hard,
we don’t care. We don’t care
what school you go to.’
“I got a lot of pressure from
my guidance counselor at high
school to enroll at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania ... I took
some tests. I did well. But we
didn’t have any money, and I had
absolutely no idea what I wanted
to do ... that was terrifying to me
even back then.”
Finally confronting the un-
known, Rowe says, “I thought, ‘Hell
— on the positive side — I’m free
and I can study anything I want.’”
So he did. He buried himself in
philosophy, English and the arts.
“All the things I love to this day,”
he says. “They just never existed
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for me originally as a ‘thing’ to
pursue. They turned out to be
a thing to look for, to fi nd. I was
lucky to go through that horrible
period of uncertainty.”
The turning point came one
night when he described his day
in his journal. “I sat down about
10 o’clock and started writing,
and an hour later I looked up,
and the sun was coming up. I
thought, ‘How in the hell is the
sun coming up at 11 o’clock at
night?’ Of course, it wasn’t. I had
sat there all night writing a cou-
ple dozen pages in the journal
about what happened that day.
“Now was it any good? Would
a publisher take that and say,
‘Oh, my god, you’re a savant!’
No, I don’t think so. But what I
learned and what gave me real
hope was that when you’re do-
ing something that you’re really
enjoying and really focus on, you
can compress time.”
Compressing time is what
Rowe does on “Dirty Jobs,”
which returned to the Discovery
Channel in a new incarnation on
Jan. 2. Whether he’s neck-deep
in a sewer, farming worm dung or
collecting alligator eggs, Rowe
exposes viewers to the unsung
heroes of our society — the folk
who make it all work.
“I’m basically impersonating a
motivational speaker and the ba-
sic message is this idea: I meet
people who don’t make a lot of
money, who work 12 hours a day.
You make $500,000 year, why
are they happier than you? Why
are they having a better time?
Why are they better balanced?
Why does the beer taste colder
at the end of the day?”