Six Degrees’ Mike Rowe

The creation of the humble horseshoe is just six stops in history away from digital dating and right-swiping to marriage matches in Six Degrees with Mike Rowe, a new series fronted by the Dirty Jobs star that launched on discovery+ earlier this month. Inspired by his father’s career as a history teacher, Rowe unexpectedly links fascinating people, places and things across time periods and time zones, hoping to pique the interest of those who might not consider themselves history buffs with a fun approach to learning more about the world we live in. Rowe talks to TV Real Weekly about what sets Six Degrees apart in the factual genre, the key to telling the truth in nonfiction TV and how he sees his job as introducing viewers to the people next door.

TV REAL: How did Six Degrees come about?
ROWE: It’s kind of like with Dirty Jobs. That show was a love letter to my grandfather, who was a skilled laborer; he could basically build anything, and I always wanted to do a show that looked like work. This show is for my dad, who was a history teacher. He always said, My job as a history teacher is not to hit the kids over the head with facts or information; it’s to get them interested in the past in some way. I always thought that if I could find a way to make a history show for people who normally wouldn’t watch a history show, then we might be onto something. That general idea was always in the back of my mind. This show came about because suddenly there was a pandemic, and we had some time on our hands and an opportunity to shoot in a way that was a little more controlled. But it turned into something very different than I thought it was going to be. Each episode starts with a seemingly ridiculous question like, Can a horseshoe find your soulmate? Can a mousetrap cure your hangover? Can a garbage man show us a picture of the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago? Can a sheep do your taxes? The more weird and random the question, the better. The answer to those questions is always yes, but the fun of answering them is what the show is about. I travel through time on a budget. We have animation, we have re-creations, we have puppets. We bring the whole San Francisco earthquake to life with puppets. It’s super weird and funny. My best friend from high school, a guy named Chuck, who is a really talented actor, he plays 35 different characters over the course of the series. What you get when you watch it is the feeling of being there with us. You have to connect these two disparate points with six degrees or six big events in history. It’s fun! It’s kind of like Drunk History—without as much drinking.

TV REAL: How were the topics explored in the initial six episodes?
ROWE: I don’t want to give away too much because the fun of watching it is seeing us ultimately land the plane. I show that an iron horseshoe directly leads to hundreds of millions of marriages. We do that by walking you through time and showing you the blacksmith who first took a horseshoe and melted a bunch of them to make the first iron plow. And the way the iron plow ushered in the agricultural revolution. And the way an outlaw in Australia named Ned Kelly used that iron plow to make a suit of armor that allowed him to survive a shootout. And the way that shootout became such a big legend and so famous in Australia that it led to the first full-length silent film, which convinced Hollywood that the movie business could be a real thing. And then we learned how that attracted all kinds of famous stars, like Hedy Lamarr, who was the most beautiful woman in the world back in the ’40s and who also created a series of inventions that should have allowed the Allies to win the Second World War a lot faster. She created something called radio hopping, which allowed us to override the jamming frequencies on torpedoes that the Nazis were deflecting. So we look at Hedy Lamarr and what happened with frequency hopping and the fact that the military didn’t use it—but 30 years later some guy found it named Norman Abramson in Hawaii, who was trying to find a better way to communicate with the computers on that island because they were cut off. Long story short, we get WiFi. And WiFi, of course, gets us to Match.com and eharmony and Tinder and all these other dating apps. It’s mind-bogglingly weird because there are about 1,000 different ways to tell the story, and each episode is my attempt to tell you the story with the facts and evidence. Every episode is 100 percent true, it’s just that [the stories] have never been lined up like that before. No one has ever argued that a horseshoe, which led to the iron plow, which led to a suit of armor, actually led to a movie, which led to an inventor, who also happened to be the most beautiful girl in the world, who created frequency hopping that led to WiFi, which allows people to swipe right and find happiness. It’s kind of like a parlor game—like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where people have to connect Kevin Bacon to anybody on the planet in six degrees. Same thing, only with history.

TV REAL: Along with all of the interesting information, what do you hope your viewers take away from watching this series?
ROWE: First and foremost, I hope they have a few laughs, have fun. I hope they wind up learning something, or maybe even becoming interested in something that they didn’t know they cared about. Those are the main things. There’s a third thing, too. It might be a bit much to hope for. But in the way that Dirty Jobs connected a lot of people because everybody has work in common. That show attracted a lot of people from both sides of the political aisle. It attracted men and women, old and young. Today, the idea of finding a topic that unites us a little more than divides us is good. History is one of those topics. It would be cool if people watched the show and came away thinking: things are pretty divided today, but we really are connected in thousands of different ways—and nothing we could ever do or say is ever going to change that.

TV REAL: What did you bring with you from your Dirty Jobs days that served you in this series?
ROWE: If you want the viewer to feel engaged with the show, then you can’t lie to them. And I don’t mean tell them something that’s not true; you have to include them in the show in a way that puts them on the scene. That means a behind-the-scenes camera that never stops rolling. On Dirty Jobs, I always had what I called “the truth cam” at the time. It was just a guy who always had a wide shot of me and the crew making the show. When I went into the edit bay to put the show together, I used that camera—not a ton, but every couple of minutes you would see a shot that reminded you that you were watching the making of a show, not just a show. I realized, when I started seeing that footage, that it was a really powerful shot. I decided a long time ago that I would always want that camera, no matter what type of show I was making, as long as it was not fiction. It helps us a ton because now you feel like you are there, watching us try to figure out ways to connect these things. You’re literally seeing us produce the show in real-time. We’re on our phones, we’re Googling facts, we’re figuring things out. Like, Okay, this scene, we don’t have the money to do it so let’s do it with puppets, let’s do this with a re-creation. It’s not just a history show for people who would watch history shows; it’s a making of a history show.

TV REAL: I understand that you’re a former Opera singer. What was your path to TV presenting, and what projects that you’ve done have stuck with you most along the way?
ROWE: I got my start by crashing an audition for the Baltimore Opera in 1982. I learned the shortest aria I could find and I sang it as loud as I could in Italian, and somehow or another, that got me in. The music wound up being better than I thought it would be and I had a better time than I thought I would ever have. I really just joined to get my union card so that I could audition for TV shows and commercials and things like that. But I wound up liking it, and I stayed in it for eight years. Along the way, I did a lot of theater, off-Broadway shows, a lot of local theaters, a lot of local commercials. I was living in Baltimore at the time. Then one day during an intermission, I was dressed as a Viking and I walked across the street to get a beer. The bartender was a friend of mine and I thought he’d have the football game on, but he was watching a big guy in a shiny suit sell pots and pans. It was QVC, and I sat there at the bar watching the QVC shopping channel and learned that there was an audition, an open call for that job the next day downtown. I bet the bartender $100 I could get a callback, and we went down the next day and they hired me on the spot after I talked about a pencil for like eight minutes. And that was my first job on TV. I stayed at QVC for three years. Got fired three times, but learned everything I needed to know to work in the industry. After that, I had maybe 300 jobs, freelancing for ten years or so. Then eventually sold the idea for Dirty Jobs. And that, as they say, was that.

TV REAL: You are an executive producer on Six Degrees. Has it become more important to you to be involved behind the scenes with your shows?
ROWE: I draw a pretty bright line between fiction and nonfiction. If it’s fiction then that’s just acting. By and large, I’ve made my career in nonfiction and it’s really important in nonfiction to be in control, or at least to have some control over what you’re doing, because there’s no character to hide behind. If you’ve seen Dirty Jobs or Returning the Favor or any of the shows I do, it’s me, for better or worse. That’s me in real life. When I’m out in the world, just living, people see me and know me—and they really do know me. I don’t pretend to be somebody I’m not in those shows. Once I realized that, I knew I had to have a say in how this show goes because I’m going to be living with Dirty Jobs for the rest of my life. Whether or not they call you an executive producer, that’s really just a credit. The real power, the real decision that you need to make, what matters most is how are you going to let the show be produced. You do have control over that. Shows like Dirty Jobs happen in the field. One of the things I did on that show was making sure that we never did a second take. Because I had the behind-the-scenes camera, I was always able to keep us moving forward. It’s important to me because take-two is always a performance, take-three is a performance, a bigger performance. The more you do it, the more of a performance it becomes. You only get one truly unscripted nonfiction moment and that’s take-one. Making sure that that show came together the way it came together was important. It set the benchmark for everything else I did.

TV REAL: What’s next for you?
ROWE: It’s been an interesting year for me in the same way it’s been an interesting year for everybody. I had a chance to step back and take a look at everything that was going on and realized that I have been fortunate because everything is connected to the foundation that I run. mikeroweWORKS evolved out of Dirty Jobs and it’s been around now for 12 years. We award $1 million a year in work-ethic scholarships for kids who want to learn a skill or learn a trade. It’s a scholarship program for those who don’t want to go to a four-year school. That’s been really, really gratifying, and I’ve realized it’s something I’m going to be doing probably for the rest of my life. Once I came to that conclusion, everything started to fall into place around it. The Discovery Channel wants to do more Dirty Jobs; it’s a show that continues to air. Returning the Favor is still in production on Facebook. We just finished our 100th episode. Then there’s the podcast The Way I Heard It, which has done really well. Then there’s [mikeroweWORKS], which fills in the cracks between all of these other things. I’ve always been busy, but I didn’t really think about it in terms of those individual projects until I went to my Facebook page one day and saw all of them side-by-side. We’re still in production on everything. It occurs to me that what I do is the same show for the last 20 years; I just change the title every six or seven years. Six Degrees is a little different because it’s a different format. But my basic job is to pat the country on the shoulder every so often and say, What about her? What about him? Get a load of that? Look what’s happening over here? You could call all of it People You Should Know.