I checked IMDB, and yes, the same pus-filled boil of a producer Craig Piligian produced “Doing da Vinci” and “American Hot Rod” and “American Chopper”. Bleagh! Good ideas turned into soap operas by concentrating on disfunctionality rather than competence.
There is no job so fascinating or workers so skilled that they can’t be turned into a squad of whining and sniping clods by a producer. I could never understand why every single car that Boyd Coddington built had to be produced by some arbitrary and insufficient deadline, and would constantly drive skilled workers to leave.
Show finally arrived in the UK (July 2011), and within two episodes the pattern of the Producer’s mantra ("OK guys, it’s 10 minutes since tempers became heated - time for Flash to make another ‘mistake’ ") has already become obvious.
What a pity - could have been a really interesting subject area in its own right.
They commissioned one of their usual three-episode pilots for a new show called Hazard Pay, which was actually a pretty cool idea. It was the same thing as Dirty Jobs, except instead of crawling around in shit, each day they would go do a dangerous job. Problem was, the host was completely unlikeable. Cool concept, immediately canceled.
(Nat. Geo. has a really cool show called World’s Toughest Fixes which never gets any respect. The host of that show is awesome, and actually knows what he’s talking about, since he was a professional rigger.)
Hasn’t this show been out for a while? Or maybe I’m thinking of something else. If it’s what I think it is I watched it for a few shows but then lost interest during one of the team competitions where it was all about the in-fighting and back biting. I thought the episode where they make the ‘tank’ was interesting in that having built it they found you couldn’t actually operate in the thing without really serious hearing damage at a minimum.