| Season | Episodes | Originally aired | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season premiere | Season finale | |||
| Pilots | 3 | November 7, 2003 | November 21, 2003 | |
| 1 | 6 | July 26, 2005 | August 30, 2005 | |
| 2 | 45 | September 27, 2005 | March 20, 2007 | |
| 3 | 34 | June 26, 2007 | July 29, 2008 | |
| 4 | 21 | October 7, 2008 | April 12, 2009 | |
| 5 | 22 | October 6, 2009 | June 14, 2010 | |
| 6 | 23 | October 19, 2010 | March 8, 2011 | |
| 7 | 11 | December 13, 2011 | February 21, 2012 | |
| 8 | 4 | August 22, 2012 | September 12, 2012 | |
In July 2006, the show aired two special episodes to kick off and wrap up Discovery's annual Shark Week, of which Mike Rowe was the host. The episodes featured him in a number of jobs related to the animals, some as outlandish as shark repellent tester and shark suit tester, both of which necessitated his jumping into a shark feeding frenzy. As a pun on Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" theme, the two episodes were named "Jobs That Bite" and "Jobs That Bite... Harder" for the opening and closing hours respectively.
In late August 2006, the show reached a milestone with Mike Rowe's 100th dirty job. This was commemorated with a special 2 hour long episode which mainly showed Mike's day with the U.S. Army's 187th Ordnance Battalion at Fort Jackson, and included bloopers plus an "about me" segment of Mike's crew. At the end of the episode, Mike Rowe and Dave Barsky had a guitar/banjo duet and performed a song about the 100 dirty jobs. A 2-hour 150th job special aired in early December 2007, which combined footage of Rowe's 150th job (working on a yak and bison farm in Montana) with footage of a party held at a San Francisco garbage dump where people featured in past Dirty Jobs segments were reunited with Rowe. In 2009, the show returned for a fifth season, with Rowe commenting in promotional spots, "After 200 dirty jobs, I'm back for more."
It was renewed for a seventh season, which Rowe described as including "a broader geographical palate."
An eighth season, marketed as Dirty Jobs Down Under, premiered on August 22, 2012. There were only four episodes filmed for season eight.
As a result of being featured in the season 1 episode "Vexcon", exterminator Bill Bretherton now has his own TV series on A&E, Billy the Exterminator.
Read more about this topic: Dirty Jobs
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)