If you’ve lived in wintry climes, you’ve probably seen a blizzard.  It’s white.  It’s bleak.  It’s featureless.  There’s just a gigantic expanse of nothing in front of you…and it’s the scariest thing ever.

That’s exactly what Ice Road Truckers’ third season, which the folks out at the History Channel sent me to review, is like–like a blizzard.

Ice Road Truckers is all about the brave folks who run the Dalton Highway, a four hundred mile stretch of road also known as the Ice Road, that serves as the only connection between Fairbanks, Alaska, and the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.  With only a tiny smattering of outposts–the entire four hundred mile run features only three stops: Fairbanks itself, the town of Coldfoot, and the town of Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay–between one end to the other, the truckers will spend hours on the road braving the cold, treacherous roads and embarrassingly frequent mechanical difficulties to get the stuff Prudhoe needs transported from Fairbanks to the end.

I called Ice Road Truckers a lot like a blizzard and with good reason.  See, there’s not much TO it.  You spend most of your time either watching a truck move or watching it stand still for some reason.  But when those trucks are moving, they’re doing things that should be downright impossible.  Anyone who’s ever driven on ice knows how nerve-wracking it can be, so imagine driving on ice, in the middle of a blizzard, with several tons of engineering product (in one case, explosives!) behind you.  Sometimes they will even drive over frozen ocean expanses.

And yet, at the same time, all you see is endless expanses of white screaming by you, a horrible landscape of pure white insanity.  For a show with such an exciting premise, man, can it ever be DULL.  And yet, it can also be exciting.  I watched, pitched forward, on literally the edge of my seat, as one of them tried to get his brakes to respond on a downward slope heading into a hairpin turn.

It was a sight to see, I kid you not.

And yet, large chunks of this show were bland, dull and featureless.

If you can put up with this incredible dichotomy, painfully dull stretches occasionally broken by SHEER BLINDING TERROR, then Ice Road Truckers will be just what you want.

The Screenhead Ten Scale looks baffled at this weird package and hands it a seven out of ten.  When it’s slow, it’s merely mediocre.  But the surprise little packages of shock, horror, and hilarity that slip into the stream of mediocre give you pause enough to consider it pretty good.