"Deadliest Catch" Strays From Reality

by Jarrett Martineau | April 18, 2008 at 10:54 am

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Whether it's ANTM, Survivor, Big Brother, Man vs. Wild, Hell's Kitchen, Flavor of Love, or Deadliest Catch, the catch is that reality television never depicts reality.

It is highly edited, produced, fabricated, made, modified, tweaked, and finessed so that you and I will find it compelling enough to watch every week. So let's give up the dream, people.

As long as it looked and felt like the Wizard's crew was about to be swept out to see by stormy seawaters, then does it really matter when the 'storm' took place, or even if it was a real storm?

Tuesday's fourth-season premiere of Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" opens during a raging nighttime storm in the Bering Sea. Mammoth waves smash an Alaskan crab fishing boat called the Wizard, sending large swells crashing over its deck. Inside, alarmed crew members discover that their stateroom is flooding with incoming seawater.

The sequence suggests that the fishermen are in danger of sinking as a violent tempest tosses huge waves against the boat.

But here's the not-so-deadliest catch:

The boat flooded in September.

The huge storm waves were from October.

And a producer may have filmed extra footage to help stitch the two events together.

Pages from a production outline obtained by The Hollywood Reporter suggest that producers of the cable network's top-rated series may have strayed from reality while editing the harrowing sequence from the show's record-setting premiere.

The document directs producers of the Emmy-nominated program to patch together a scene of life-and-death peril from different days of filming.