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The History Channel

Fairbanks viewers will have to wait a few weeks to see their city featured in the new show “Tougher in Alaska with Geo Beach,” but once it gets rolling, stories and familiar faces from the Interior will pop up throughout the season.

“I bet throughout the time that our film crew and I were out, we spent more time in Fairbanks than anywhere else in the state,” said Geo Beach, the host of the new History Channel show, which premiers May 8. “We didn’t do anything in Anchorage because it’s more of an urban area. Fairbanks, on the other hand, is truly a suburban area, but it’s in the middle of the wild.”

The first crews started filming in March 2007 — Beach jumped on board in April — and worked through March of this year, with a final shoot scheduled for May. In Fairbanks, they spent time with the North Star Volunteer Fire Department, a local Boy Scout Troop, the crew at Homestead Pumping and Thawing, Golden Valley Electric Association and truckers heading up the haul road to Deadhorse.

“In between, I bet I was in Fairbanks for about four weeks, maybe a little longer than that, throughout a couple of different seasons,” Beach said.

In the 13-part series, Fairbanks appears in about five episodes, and The Golden Heart City stars In “Deadly Winters,” scheduled to air May 29.

“The essence of that episode is that Fairbanks is an urban area, but guess what? That doesn’t get you away from the fact that it’s tough to live up here,” Beach said. “It has got to be the northernmost substantial urban area in North America. There’s not a whole lot of cities that big that are snug up against the Arctic Circle.”

He also logged hours in Fairbanks with a crossing guard and a meter maid at 40-below zero, and worked with the Water Wagon on home deliveries and water station fill-ups.

“I went out with Boy Scouts who were getting their 100-below badge,” he said. “They were really happy because it was more than 40 below. They have to aggregate 100 degrees below zero in five nights or less.”

He slept in the firehouse and pulled his gear on like everyone else when a call came in to the North Star Volunteer Fire Department.

“I’m not pointing a microphone at anybody. They’re pointing me at a shovel and I’ve got to get to work. I was the low man on the totem pole,” Beach said. “I was with the Boy Scouts crawling in snow caves, out with crossing guards, chalking tires with meter maids, pulling hoses and filing up water tanks.”

In another Fairbanks-heavy episode, called “Wild Waste,” and scheduled to air July 31, Beach worked with Ken and Bob at Homestead Pumping and Thawing, installing and repairing wastewater systems in the bitter cold.

“It afforded me the opportunity to unfreeze frozen septic systems at 48 below zero, and the answer is, ‘Yes, they do stink, even in that kind of cold.’ It gets very odoriferous,” he said.

Beach uses participatory journalism to dive in to the tasks at hand: logging, long-haul truck driving, firefighting, mining, fishing, railroading. Each episode jumps from summer to winter scenes, urban to rural and big business to mom-and-pop scenarios.

“It was great to be able to convey real, blue-collar journalism,” he said. “I’ve always tried to report by shoe-leather reporting, really getting into the situation, but in this series, I really get to be George Plimpton.”

Plimpton was famous for competing in professional sporting events and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur.

Fairbanks also appears in episodes on linemen, when he worked with Golden Valley Electric Association, the haul road to Deadhorse, and railroading, which highlights energy production at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

As an Alaskan, Beach, who has lived in Homer for 25 years, worked hard to make the show as accurate as possible.

“This is not reality television, because that term has been hijacked and is now Orwellian. It’s the most highly scripted thing, and the most opposite of freeform,” he said. ‘Tougher in Alaska,’ rather, is nonfiction, documentary journalism. “The medium is television and we want the elements to be engaging, entertaining and exciting, and we’re trying to honor that medium. I’ve been a journalist for a long time, and it’s always my goal to tell stories the right way for the medium.”

Beach traveled the state with a videographer, a sound person and a producer and the all shared camera duty, in an attempt to get the most video possible with the smallest crew.

Beach visualized his audience as an old high school friend or relative who hasn’t had a chance to visit Alaska, and worked to paint the most accurate picture of the state that he could.

“We don’t have any competitions for people to catch more fish or run more miles or chop more trees,” he said. “It’s not reality television. We’re trying to go to the real stories of real Alaskans with the belief that that’s enough.”

Through his travels, he’s found that each piece of Alaska has its own albatross.

“Alaska is big and it’s diverse. People talk about there being six states of Alaska, and we were in all of those places,” he said. “It’s not comparing just apples to oranges. It’s apples to tangerines to grapefruits to oranges.”

The “toughest” place in Alaska is the one you’re getting dressed to go out into that morning, he said.

“There’s no ‘tougher’ in Alaska,” he said. “It’s just tougher and tougher and tougher.”