In July 2006, the show aired two special episodes to kick off and wrap up Discovery's annual
Shark Week, of which Rowe was the host. The episodes featured him in a number of jobs related to the animals, some as outlandish as shark repellent tester and shark suit tester, both of which necessitated his jumping into a shark
feeding frenzy. As a pun on Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" theme, the two episodes were named "
Jobs That Bite" and "
Jobs That Bite... Harder" for the opening and closing hours respectively. In late August 2006, the show reached a milestone with Rowe's 100th dirty job. This was commemorated with a
special two-hour episode which mainly showed Rowe's day with the
U.S. Army's 187th Ordnance Battalion at
Fort Jackson, and included bloopers plus an "about me" segment of Rowe's crew. At the end of the episode, Rowe and Dave Barsky had a guitar/banjo duet and performed a song about the 100 dirty jobs. A
2-hour 150th job special aired in early December 2007, which combined footage of Rowe's 150th job (working on a
yak and
bison farm in
Montana) with footage of a party held at a San Francisco garbage dump where people featured in past
Dirty Jobs segments were reunited with Rowe. In 2009, the show returned for a fifth season, with Rowe commenting in promotional spots, "After 200 dirty jobs, I'm back for more." It was renewed for a seventh season, which Rowe described as including "a broader geographical palate." An eighth season, marketed as
Dirty Jobs Down Under, premiered on August 22, 2012. As a result of being featured in the season 1 episode "Vexcon", exterminator Billy Bretherton later starred in his own series on A&E,
Billy the Exterminator.
Submissions Each episode ends with a segment, usually shot at a previous dirty job, where Rowe tells the viewers that the show's continued existence depends on viewer submissions of suggestions for additional dirty jobs, and instructs them to go to the show's website for details on how to submit ideas (this segment is, however, usually edited out of the Canadian broadcasts of the series on Discovery Channel Canada). Rowe has often noted on-screen and off-screen that without viewer contributions, the show would be lost; Rowe originally concocted a list of a dozen jobs that could be featured in the three episodes that served as the show's pilot, and within days after the first episode aired, viewers flooded Discovery Channel with e-mail and video featuring their own dirty jobs, a tradition that has kept the show going ever since. As Rowe explained to
Craig Ferguson on an episode of
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in July 2007 about his original cache of jobs for the pilots, "I haven't had an original idea since then".
Unaired segments According to
roadkill taxidermy artist
Stephen Paternite,
Dirty Jobs filmed a segment featuring him in 2003, which was ultimately cut by the Discovery Channel as "too gross". The segment follows Rowe and Paternite as they gather and skin dead
raccoons, which Paternite will eventually turn into art pieces. The segment is available to view on Paternite's website, and on
YouTube, under the name "Too Gross for Discovery". In an interview on
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Rowe also mentioned that there were several segments which they have chosen not to air because they were too disturbing, including a "
body farm" for the study of
decomposition. Even aired segments can be heavily edited, such as the "
skull cleaner" segment, the final aired version of which Rowe has likened to "
The Sound of Music with the songs edited out" because parts of it were deemed too graphic for television. There is also an episode produced in 2006 where in Rowe visited his doctor while producers Piligian and Eddie Barbini try two dirty jobs themselves. The episode, entitled "Mike's Day Off", was never aired in the United States for that season; it was only available as a DVD-exclusive episode (bundled with the episode "Skull Cleaner") and a downloadable episode in
iTunes. The episode has been aired in some local Discovery Channel feeds such as those of Southeast Asia and Australia, as well as on
Discovery Channel Canada before finally being aired in the United States on March 3, 2009. Various episodes air in certain countries with different scenes. == Music ==