Coal TV: The Hyper-real Mineral Frontier

• In Event: Energy Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper offers up a cultural critique of a 2011 reality TV series centered on hard-rock coal mining in McDowell County, West Virginia, a part of Appalachia known for its entrenched poverty and for its 100-year-long history of coal mining. That series entitled Coal: Danger Runs Deep ran for ten episodes and was watched by approximately 6 million viewers in the United States before it was exported to Britain and rereleased on the UK Discovery Channel. Produced by the wildly successful Thom Beers, who is known for The Deadliest Catch, Lobster Wars, Ice Road Truckers, and A Thousand Ways to Die, this docudrama promised viewers an unadulterated look down the shaft of a coal mine. But, like all media and entertainment, Coal TV did not come unmediated, so to speak.

In this paper, I examine the neoliberal imaginary that frames Americans’ political and cultural relationship to coal. I argue that the politics of mainstream media – especially its high-velocity 24-7 coverage and its shift to reality-based programming – tends to reinforce, intentionally and inadvertently, a liberal (and now neoliberal) mythology of individualism, free markets, free contracts, and free agents, that erases both the underlying material structures of exploitation and stratification as well as the ecological structures that define late capitalism and have been embedded in the fossil economy since its origins in the nineteenth century.

A premise of this paper is that how we represent coal matters in an age of climate change and widespread working-class injury. After all, coal veins run deep in the geography and body politic of the United States. Coal might feel like it is on the way out, we might treat it as a historic object (as if coal refers back to an earlier era of company towns, unregulated capital, and raw battles between paid henchmen and fed-up miners), but the depressing fact is that the peak year of coal production was not long ago, ca. 2009. By that point, the US was burning almost twice as much coal as it did when coal was king, and that trend has only been revised marginally downward since. Knowing twenty-first century coal, knowing McDowell Country, knowing the Power River Basin, matters as much as knowing about the Dakota Pipeline or the Maconda Blowout.

Author

• Bob Johnson, National University