‘Dirty Jobs’ Turns 20: Relive the Messiness With These Clips, Then Go Shower (VIDEO)

Twenty years ago, TV host Mike Rowe rolled up his sleeves for the pilot episode of Dirty Jobs, the Discovery series in which he delves into difficult, disgusting occupations. In that first episode — which aired on November 7, 2003 — Rowe collected bat guano for fertilizer, used mud to treat baseballs, and tried his hand gutting fish.

Two decades later, Rowe is still traveling the world and getting his hands dirty. After leaving the Discovery lineup in 2012, Dirty Jobs made a comeback with a Rowe’d Trip spinoff series in 2020 and then returned for a ninth and tenth season last year.

To celebrate Dirty Jobs’ 20th anniversary, here are some of the most gag-worthy segments from the docuseries.

Cleaning the grime inside a water tower

Once the workers drained the 150,000 gallons of water from this water tower, they set about pressure-washing the interior and sending the resulting sludge down 20 stories to the ground. And Rowe observes, in quite a vivid analogy, that the grime comes off “like the dead skin being slowly peeled off a sunburned back.”

Going jellyballing

Rowe tagged along as fishermen went “balling” for 50 tons of cannonball jellyfish, even getting knee-deep in the jellies that spilled from their nets. “It’ll take the flavor of anything that it’s put with,” Captain Michael Boone told Rowe. “You have a pound of hamburger here, and you got a pound of processed jelly balls … you made that pound of hamburger go to two pounds.”

Eating a Carolina reaper

Rowe was nearly overwhelmed by the fumes as he met with Ed Currie, creator of the Carolina Reaper — which was then the world’s hottest chili pepper — and extracted seeds from the pepper’s flesh. Currie told Rowe that the pepper has certain digestive side effects, yet one Dirty Jobs cameraman still sampled the product.

Recycling hotel soap

Believe it or not, some of the 11 million bars of soap used by hotel guests every day around the world gets recycled by organizations like Clean the World, a charity organization that sends refreshed soap to 127 countries around the world. The result is sanitary, but first, you have to pick out things like toilet paper and human hair.

Cleaning the algae from a pool

Rowe found out what it takes to clean a swimming pool for the first time in 17 years. As if the layer of slime-green algae wasn’t bad enough, the pool was also filled with trash that had to be pulverized with a garbage disposal. Then began the back-breaking work of shoveling out the muck at the bottom…

Cleaning a roach-infested manhole

In one episode, Rowe descended into a manhole in a McDonald’s parking lot in Tennessee. But it wasn’t the roach infestation down below that made a Dirty Jobs field producer vomit. “Heat rises, and with it, the smell of raw sewage,” Rowe explained. “The warm funk is a palpable thing, and it hit Zack in the face like a dirty diaper.”

Making deer urine

The Dirty Jobs host had to wade into a shed filled with deer feces — “deer-rhea,” as he quipped — to help the company J&S Scents manufacture deer urine to sell to hunters. And Rowe made the amateur mistake of overfilling his wheelbarrow. Fair warning: This clip is not for the weak-stomached.