TVSquad

The History Channel has updated its website and schedule for the the return of one of its toughest and most popular reality series, Ice Road Truckers.

Set to return Sunday nights on May 31, new episodes of Ice Road Truckers take the show's cameras from the diamond mines and frozen highways of Canada's Northwest Territories north to the oil fields of Alaska.

Previous seasons featured rugged truck drivers (like Hugh "The Polar Bear" Rowland, right) braving subzero temperatures to drive rigs weighing thousands of tons over ice pathways smoothed out over frozen lakes.

Spike TV has picked up the original, non-scripted series 1,000 Ways to Die. The title of the show says it all -- it just chronicles the many ways people leave this world. It's from Thom Beers, the same guy who produced Ice Road Truckers, The Deadliest Catch, and Ax-Men. There seems to be a theme with Beers's shows, don't you think? The show was originally a two-part special that aired in May on Spike. It performed so well that the network has order ten 30-minute episodes.

Family and the workplace -- two constants in everyday American society. They are the places where we spend most of our lives. Sometimes we spend more time at one over complaints of the other. Other times, we barely want to spend time at either location.

Because these are so important to many people across this country, it made sense that television would delve into both of these environments during the Reality Revolution. However, since a 60-minute show about a senior technical analyst sitting in his four square-foot cube was not likely to draw in the audience, the reality shows that were created focused on those families and workplaces that were a tad more unique. Thusly, shows were created around well-to-do families, celebrity families, or families with multiple children, while workplace shows dealt in tattoos, motorcycles, hair styling, and house-flipping.

Coming in later than the game operas and relationship shows, these family and workplace programs ushered in a new phase of the Reality Revolution and set the stage for the future of reality programming.