Thom Beers Talks Testosterone TV

For about as long as television has been an advertising medium, advertisers seeking a heavily male audience, especially a young one, have turned to sports. More recently, edgy comedy entered the mix. But lately, some broadcasters not heavily invested in sports or comedy are trying to appeal to men with factual programming heavy on testosterone.

The foremost practitioner of the genre is, by most accounts, Thom Beers, the executive producer of such hits as Deadliest Catch for Discovery Channel, Black Gold for truTV, Ice Road Truckers for HISTORY and Storage Wars, the second-season premiere of which set ratings records for A&E in the U.S. in July.

Beers sums up his formula for success with male viewers simply: “It’s high risk, high reward in an exotic location.”

Many of the shows Beers produces for his company, Original Productions, based in Burbank and owned by FremantleMedia, involve jobs that meet those criteria.

“Most men have a job,” he says. “They know exactly how much money they’re going to make. They know pretty much what their job is going to be. We take those guys to a place they know they’ll never get to, but they’ve always wanted to know what it would be like. It means, ‘I’m going to drive a truck in the middle of winter, at 40 [degrees] below zero and I may break through the ice, but I’ll make thousands of dollars more than I’ll ever make in a week doing what I do.’ It’s a job they’ll never have in places they’ll never get to go. And rewards they’ll probably never reap either.”

Not all of Beers’s shows involve jobs, though. Storage Wars, for instance, involves abandoned storage lockers that are auctioned to buyers who bid on the contents after only a cursory examination. The winner of the “storage war” is the bidder who makes the most profit on his or her bid.

His newest, for HISTORY, is Around the World in 80 Ways, which Beers describes as “a buddy show. It’s two guys who travel around the world. The challenge is that they have to use 80 different means of transportation. I get to tell almost the history of transportation. It’s funny; it’s provocative. A lot of the means of transportation are things you’ve never heard of before. It’s a fun little show.”

Beyond risk, reward and location, Beers looks for authentic characters. “To make a successful show you’ve got to have great characters,” he says. “Casting is really key. You need unique characters with unique skill sets. Authenticity is really important. It’s not like we manufacture or script the shows. People know the difference. The guys who come to our shows are looking for that real, authentic experience.”

For Around the World in 80 Ways, Beers cast Rob Mariano, a veteran of Survivor and The Amazing Race, and Dennis Anderson, the creator of the monster truck Grave Digger.

Other series from Beers include Coal for Spike TV, which centers on West Virginia coal mining, and, for HISTORY, Ax Men, a look at Pacific Northwest loggers, and IRT: Deadliest Roads, which takes drivers from the “ice roads” into the Himalayas.

Beers acknowledges that many of his shows would do well on the male-oriented channels, but he questions their budgets. “I’m sure they would love to have one of those shows, but I’m not sure they can afford that $15,000 per-episode fee. The niche channels are not in the first position. You’ve already gone through every terrestrial and every Discovery, Nat Geo Channel, HISTORY, A&E, before you’ve gotten to them.”

Beers says many of his shows appeal to younger men. “That 18-to-34 male audience is our sweet spot. Our average age is 41 years old. We certainly see an opportunity there. 1000 Ways to Die draws a really young male audience, 15- to 21-year-olds. That’s a tough audience to hit.”

The show, made for Spike in the U.S., in the vein of Jackass, uses youthful risk-taking combined with humor to present, mostly, near-death situations along with analyses of real fatalities resulting from questionable behavior.

Beers also says his shows reach broad male audiences that include younger and older viewers. “In most of the stuff we do, we find multi-generational viewing,” he says. “We find fathers and sons, mothers and daughters watching our shows. Originally when I did Monster Garage, it was a really unique opportunity for a man and his boy to sit down and watch a show and both of them get a unique experience out of it.”