TV

Black Gold chronicles the daily grind and explosive drama of oil-field drilling in West Texas. The debut had plenty of reality-TV traditions -- it sets up a drama-inducing narrative by focusing on three competing operations all drilling in hopes of tapping into the same reserve. It introduces plenty of colorful characters. Each operation has its own team of players,starting with the driller who is like the quarterback and, of course, each driller represents a rival archetype. There's Gerald, the old-timer who lost a thumb in one accident and at one point brags of being a member of an exclusive club made up of guys who have fallen from the top of a rig and survived. Then there's Wayne, also old-school. His team calls him Dad and he hates the management suits who don't know one end of a drill from the other. And then there's Justin, who's young to be a driller, but he's all business and no nonsense.

Add all the various roughnecks who come in one variety or another of the work-hard/play-hard mold and you've got a show that's at once an amalgam of every good-ole-boy cliche and utterly authentic. The producers know how to wring story-telling opportunities out of all this gritty reality. They even imbue the drilling rigs themselves with personalities and backstories. There's the Longhorn -- an old but trusty and traditional rig. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles but it will get the job done. There's the Big Dog. It's just, you know, really big and fast, when there aren't problems slowing it down. And then there's the Viking. It's new and expensive and full of computerized, cutting-edgy technology. It's a great rig, or at least it would be if it would ever run properly.

Just as with Deadliest Catch, this show seems on course to cut through all the macho bluster and death-around-every-corner cliches and get at some real insights and revealing observations about this kind of work and these kinds of men. You also learn about drilling. I didn't know how it worked, what those drills were really doing, but after just the first hour, I now know the basics. Black Gold may not have frigid waves crashing over the ship deck, or giant trucks cruising over blizzard-slicked fields of ice. But there's the sun-baked desolation of a West Texas field and after a length of shattered chain bounces off the hardhat of a worker named Peanut, you believe it when guys talk about how dangerous drilling for oil can be.