TV REVIEWS : Look at Harsh Work in ‘Two Miles Down’

Warning: “Two Miles Down,” airing tonight at 7 and 10 on the Discovery Channel, is not for claustrophobics. This look at the miners who toil beneath the Earth’s surface in South Africa’s deepest gold mines is an examination of hard lives and hard work in cramped, confined quarters.

The show’s press release calls this human dimension “the little-known real price of gold.” Indeed, it is: More than 600 men die each year from fires, floods, methane gas explosions and rock bursts.

They do it for the money, not the ambience. “Two Miles Down” is at its best when showing the stinking conditions the men face: the searing heat and near-100% humidity (air-conditioned to the “tolerable” high 90s), the noise so deafening that workers communicate only by elaborate hand-signals.

As long as it stays with this slice-of-life format, “Two Miles Down” is fairly engrossing, despite a tendency to harp over and over again about the mine’s “excellent safety precautions” (did the producers have to agree to this to gain access?). The segment comparing the lives of a white engineer and a black crew leader who work together is a nice digression.

But near the end, this approach is abandoned for a sudden shift in tone that undercuts what little subtlety and moral strength the show had: We get a heavy-handed, abrupt lesson/sermon about the horrors men inflict on men, ranging from slaves toiling under the pharaohs to Siberian political prisoners, culminating with modern footage of 12,000 Brazilians crawling like ants over an open-pit mine.

As slice-of-life, “Two Miles Down” works. As lesson/sermon, it doesn’t.