One in the sea of line-of-work documentaries dressed up as reality shows. Salvaging wreckages sunk below sea or stranded on beaches is an interesting and worthy profession, to be sure, but I doubt one could milk more than an hour or two worth of watch out of it. Surely, every wreckage is a story of its own but once you get the gist of it there's no need to stick around as a spectator. Therefore the show banks on the likeability of the characters and interesting directing to stretch it over a season or more.
So are the characters likeable? Not really. And I'm not even sure if they're a genuine salvage crew or just actors. If they're just actors, all the worse for them. The main guy, who's also the boss, growls and speaks in thick accent so he's barely intelligible, which would be charming if there wasn't for his dour personality. There are two males in his crew: one is completely unnoticeable, while the other is supposed to be off kilter and funny, but only comes across as an irritating cliche. There are also two females: more an eye candy than useful in terms of salvaging. Their skimpy outfits are there to compensate for the fact that they're not given a lot of meaningful tasks. In terms of the profession, they could've done without the girls, but in terms of the show, they girls are salvaging it.
The director, editor and screenplayer try all kinds of trickery to present the job as dangerous, what with sudden zooms, cuts and contrivances. The characters narrate it in such a manner that you'd think terrible things happen to them all the time, but the camera just doesn't corroborate it. It probably is dangerous sometimes, but they can't really hide the obvious routine and mundanity behind all the occasional malfunctions of equipment and bouts of bad weather. There is an attempt to amp up the fun part of the job as well, but it boils down to watching the crew throw an occasional afterhour party or try pulling pranks on each other. Nothing that sets this particular profession apart from any other.
It would really be much better if it was presented straightforwardly, without all the makeup, the way documentaries used to be like. But nowadays everything has to be "exciting" and "intense" and "funny" and "MTV" and whatnot. I guess it's working for some since the series has entered it's third season already. But for this viewer it's just an uninformative waste of time - and a depressing watch, despite the gorgeous setting.
