.Best Local TV Celeb Gone Big Time: A very amiable guy with a very bad job

Remember Mike Rowe, the square-jawed, totally deadpan host of CBS 5’s Evening Magazine, in which he and then-cohost Malou Nubla ran around the Bay Area turning up human-interest stories and having mildly wacky adventures? Yeah, well, he’s totally got a better job now. Or at least one that is much, much messier. Now the host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, Rowe maintains his usual droll demeanor while doing the hazardous and/or barf-inducing: inspecting sewers, gutting fish, cleaning up roadkill, and in one particularly harrowing sequence nearly drowning in thigh-high bat poop. Or how about the time they made him dive for golf balls in a particularly gummy pond that also contained an alligator? Or the time at the horse breeding farm where he had to stick his hand all the way up a … well, never mind. At any rate, the real fun of the show is watching Rowe toss off dry one-liners while doing something ridiculously gross and getting critiqued on his gutting, cleaning, or alligator-avoidance techniques by the professionals who have to do this sort of thing full-time. We see a bright future for the show, which is simultaneously hilarious, disgusting, and somehow in its third season despite having been on the air for less than a year. Now we have to go take a bath.