Trivia / Deadliest Catch

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Scott Campbell, Jr. of the Seabrooke, never called himself a legend; he's said that he "wants to be legendary," like it's a goal he's working towards. In fact, during one of the specials in Season 8, when the captains are asked a question along the lines of "What's your biggest secret?," Junior reveals that his is that he always considers himself a failure.
  • Similarly, Edgar never ACTUALLY fires Jake. Jake quits before Edgar can actually pull the trigger, then has his resignation rejected by Edgar who asks him to finish out Blue Crab season (which Jake does). It is only after Blue Crab season is finished, that Jake is called before the Hansen siblings and allowed to resign and take the job on the Kiska Sea.
• Completely Different Title: Quite a few examples...
  • Chinese: Yú rén de bódòu (漁人的搏鬥; "Fisherman's Fight")
  • Finnish: Vaarallisilla vesillä ("In Dangerous Waters")
  • French: Péril en haute mer ("Danger on the High Seas")
  • German: Der gefährlichste Job Alaskas ("The Most Dangerous Job in Alaska")
  • Vietnamese: Chuyến săn bão táp ("Storm Hunt")
• Died During Production: Captain Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie suffered a stroke on January 29th, 2010, and passed away 11 days later on February 9. The boat was captained by someone else to finish out the season's taping, but Jake, Josh, and the rest of the Cornelia Marie crew's involvement in both fishing and the show was, for a time, up in the air. In Phil's episode of After the Catch Josh said that although Phil left them his part-ownership of the boat, they were going to take at least one season off to give it a major refurbishing after they scattered Phil's ashes at the start of the next king crab season. In the end, though, they went back to fishing that very next season.
• Follow the Leader: Swords, Lobstermen, Whale Wars...
  • Even the BBC got in on the act, with the rather more prosaically-titled Trawlermen.
  • Plus every adventurous "reality" show set in Alaska.
• Money, Dear Boy: Why would you leave your family for as much as four months at a time, endure little sleep, unhealthy food, unsafe working conditions, hellish weather, and knowing you could very well die any day of the week? Well, how would you like to earn a year's salary in those four months?
  • Elliot's discovering that, maybe, he should've spent more time with his girlfriend and their kids instead of obsessing over money.
  • Has become a running gag with Keith, since Season 5 left Keith drowning in debt due to the massive amount of repairs needed to fix the Wizard and a cancer scare in between Seasons 4 and 5. All told, this left Keith flat broke, which led him into deep debt when he did very poorly fishing in Season 5.
  • Similarly, the need to make money to pay off debt has become a running gag on the Time Bandit as of Season 9. After suffering near-catastrophic ice damage in Season 8, the Hillstrand brothers sunk every dime they had to essentially rebuild their ship to make it capable of withstanding ice damage — and even then, it will be two or three years before they are back in the black.
  • Essentially every season starts with at least one captain, ship and crew (or more) facing a huge mountain of debt which they absolutely must pay down with fishing proceeds to stave off bankruptcy ... just in time for the next wave of overhauls and repairs to come along and build them a new mountain of bills and debt. Rinse and repeat.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi. Interestingly, a 60 Minutes segment on Bon Jovi featured a snippet from his concert, and during that song crashing waves were in the background. Unfortunately, downloads, DVD collections and international airings use a similar-sounding generic recording, presumably for licensing reasons.
• Referenced by...: In Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, Pete watches Deadliest Catch. Gabe sits with him even though just watching it makes him seasick. Pete tells Gabe that crew have to throw the cameras away after every season because the ice and salt wear them out. He wonders if he could go to Alaska and try out for a spot on the crew.
• Role-Ending Felony:
  • It seems that an ex-greenhorn (who was already wanted when he joined the show) robbed a bank and fled to Canada.
  • Season 10 Cape Caution greenhorn Kelly "Tinkerbell" Collins would rather have to deal with a weapons charge in Alabama than spend another minute at sea... too bad the authorities don't need to deal with him for a few months.
  • Similarly, a Cape Caution greenhorn in Season 12 was fired before they even set off for their first fishing trip, for lying to the captain when asked if there were any warrants out for his arrest.
  • Edgar Hansen stopped being featured on the show after pleading guilty to sexual assault charges.
  • In September 2022, renewed attention was brought to a 1999 sexual assault case, in which Josh Harris pled guilty to the sexual assault of a four year old girl. When Discovery found out, Harris was immediately fired from the show. Obviously, the show's spinoff series focusing on him, Deadliest Catch: Bloodline, was also cancelled, and Discovery scrubbed the series in its entirety from their streaming service.
• Technology Marches On: As the show's been airing for over a decade, the technology available to the crews has advanced by leaps and bounds. In the beginning, crews were isolated and reliant on radios and satellite phones to communicate. In later seasons, thanks to advances in satellite communications, crews can make video calls home on their smartphones and even stream live football games onto shipboard TVs (albeit as an incredibly expensive treat^note streaming the Super Bowl cost around $5000).