Steven Spielberg’s ultimate guilty pleasure TV series: “My favourite show on the air”
When you think ‘movies’, you think Steven Spielberg. The legendary director has contributed more classics to the genre than anyone else on Earth, conquering a range of styles, genres, and mediums with his honest, heartfelt approach to storytelling.
He has been responsible for the careers of many a superstar, from Christian Bale to Ke Huy Quan, and is capable of making magic even on his worst day. In many ways, he is cinema, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying other things out across his illustrious career.
His first feature film, Duel, was originally made for television, before it was eventually given a theatrical release. Prior to this, he directed a number of episodes of TV, including the pilot for the popular detective series Columbo, and returned to the small screen even after he hit the big time. He famously created and produced Amazing Stories, an anthology series not unlike The Twilight Zone, and Band of Brothers, the seminal World War II miniseries. On a completely different note, he produced the kids show Tiny Toon Adventures, even appearing in one episode as himself.
He’s created a lot of great TV, but what does Mr Spielberg actually sit down and watch? Boston University asked him this very question. Some of his answers were pretty straightforward, but he gave one response that nobody could have seen coming.
“I love watching network series that are well written. I always watch Mad Men. I watch the new show Southland that John Wells does, which I think is genius,” he said, before veering wildly in a new direction. “The other thing is I watch a lot of reality television. It’s a guilty pleasure. My favorite show on the air right now is Deadliest Catch.”
Debuting on the Discovery Channel in 2005, Deadliest Catch follows the lives of crab fishermen working on the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. This might not sound particularly interesting, but this line of work is incredibly dangerous. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics called commercial fishing the most dangerous job in the world in 2006, with crab fishing being even more dangerous due to the adverse weather conditions during the season. According to the show’s first episode, the fatality rate in crab fishing averages out at around one fisherman per week.
Spielberg is far from the only highly successful person to fall prey to trashy reality TV. On The Adam Buxton Podcast, Paul McCartney admitted to being a big fan of American Pickers, a show where a group of antique experts travel the country in search of hidden gems.
Despite initially resisting its “charms”, Zendaya eventually became a devotee of the British dating show Love Island, in which a group of conventionally attractive but incredibly dim-witted people attempt to convince the nation that they love each other in order to win sponsorship deals. That’s not technically, what the show’s about, but come on…
Considering he watches so much of the show, has it had any impact on Spielberg and his creative process? “The only thought process I have when I’m watching Deadliest Catch is I hope I’m never caught at sea in a storm.” Wise words indeed.
