Mike Rowe Reveals Why He Changed His Mind About a ‘Dirty Jobs’ Reboot (Exclusive)

Mike Rowe never expected to return to Dirty Jobs almost a decade after its initial run. The legacy of the Discovery show lived on, however, and with its fervent fan base and increasingly relevant message about the labor force, Rowe increasingly warmed to returning to his days of dirty work. The host and mikeroweWORKS founder opened up about the new iteration of Dirty Jobs to PopCulture.com ahead of Sunday’s all-new episode. 

“You ever go back to your old high school? Everything is familiar but strange,” Rowe said of returning to Dirty Jobs. While The Way I Heard It podcast host swore he’d never do a reboot of the series, despite his love for it, as he was “genuinely dubious about the wisdom of crawling back in the ring” at age 59. “This is a young man’s show,” he joked to PopCulture, adding on another note, “I was mostly just concerned that people wouldn’t know why I was doing it. Like I have nothing else going on.”

Over the years, however, Rowe realized just how much of a place Dirty Jobs has in 2022. With 11 million open jobs in the U.S. that don’t require four-year degrees, a global pandemic and $1.7 trillion in an increasingly dire student debt crisis, the message of Dirty Jobs and the mikeroweWORKS Foundation caught up with headlines about essential workers. “That’s ultimately what did it for me,” Rowe told PopCulture.

“When you talk about essential workers, you end up implying that millions of people are not essential,” he explained. With Dirty Jobs, he hopes people realize “all work is connected, all jobs are connected,” noting, “You can’t cherry-pick chunks of the workforce and elevate them falsely or ignore them.”

The mikeroweWORKS Foundation gives half a million dollars via scholarships every year to kids looking to learn valuable trades. “You can’t really talk about the definition of a good job unless you also talk about the definition of a good education,” he told PopCulture, “and this idea that the best path for the most people is the most expensive path, the path to a four-year degree, that’s just a dangerous fiction.” Dirty Jobs airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on Discovery.