Haven’t Had Enough Of Coal Miners? Spike TV Announces A New Reality Series

It’s official: coal miners in danger are the new vampires. With the rescue footage from Chile getting boffo ratings, we can all expect a deluge of sexy coal miner books, coal miner Halloween costumes, and, eventually, a terrible coal miner comedy made with the belief that merely mentioning something famous is all you need for a joke. But, first, we’ve got to get a coal miner reality series and, fortunately, that’s what Spike TV is giving us with Coal, a new series announced today. What wonderful timing!

The show will follow a community surrounding a West Virginia mine and will be along the lines of the shows Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men in that the audience watches men doing dangerous jobs and hope nothing bad happens while the TV executives kinda hope something does (not that they’d ever admit it!). Of course, Coal wasn’t inspired by this year’s Chilean tragedy. That would be totally inappropriate. No, it was inspired by last year’s tragedy that resulted in the deaths 29 miners in West Virginia. That’s much better.

But maybe I’m being unfair. From The Hollywood Reporter:

“’It didn’t take a tragedy, and then a miracle, to get us excited about this,’ said Sharon Levy, executive vp original programming at Spike. ‘Obviously, we’re humongous fans of the kind of shows Thom [Beers] does that celebrate the everyday man. He said, ‘We’re working on this project called ‘Coal’,’ and we said we’d take it.’
The show will focus on Mike Crowder and Tom Roberts, co-owners of Cobalt Mine in Westchester, WVa., as well as the area’s miners, families and community members. The mining team has more than 40 employees, and ‘Coal’ will show every major aspect of their jobs — from planting explosives to surface mining to working in a traditional mine shaft.
The network will premiere 10 episodes of the one-hour series in April. Philip D. Segal is also an executive producer on the show.
Levy said the dire situation in Chile during the past 70 days only reinforced the idea that a close look at the harsh realities of mining was overdue. The network was prepared to announce the project weeks ago but held off until rescue workers could free the miners.”

Sounds awesome, right? One suggestion though: I know it takes place in West Virginia, but if Spike doesn’t fit Mario Sepulveda in this somehow, they’re missing out. Of course, maybe he should get his own show. If miners are the new vampires, we’re going to need a Vampire Diaries to compete with this show’s True Blood.

(h/t The A.V. Club)

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