Otherwise, the first two seasons of shooting have transpired much as the TWISTEX team had anticipated. Storm Chasers adheres to a standard Discovery Channel reality formula. The score is all electric-guitar riffs and cymbal crashes. The sound engineers occasionally insert some stock wildcat roaring and growling to augment the moaning of the wind, as if a hundred-mile-per-hour gale weren’t fearsome enough. The interteam tension is usually manufactured, a ginned-up horse race to spot the most and biggest tornadoes. Even Tim seems unable to resist the temptation to play to the cameras, at one point intoning ominously, “This could spell disaster!”
Aside from a few harmless dramatics, though, he refuses to lob snide sound bites at his so-called competitors or to indulge in intrateam sniping. Tim instructs the Iowa State students to behave professionally. “They’re going to create stories that do not exist because it’s a TV show,” he says, “and it has to be about catfighting. You guys will not talk about stuff if we’re having disagreements.”
For Carl, Storm Chasers is his biggest role since his fleeting appearance at the end of Against the Law. He gives himself over to the process with gusto, even going so far as to enroll in voice-acting lessons. The premiere is a major event for him and his father, Bob Young, and they follow the show religiously.
For much of the crew, the hovering cameras, the dumbed-down reality format, and the wholesale excision of the mesonets are little more than annoyances. They’ve borne them because TWISTEX can’t survive without Discovery. But gradually, minor grievances give way to legitimate problems. For starters, funding seems to arrive at the last minute every season, forcing Lee, Finley, and Tim to calibrate gear in the field or risk losing deployment opportunities. “Motel parking lots aren’t the ideal laboratories for installing new equipment,” Finley says.
Without fail, there’s always some component that isn’t ready. Tim’s TOWER deployment on the Bowdle, South Dakota, tornado last year, for example, could have yielded much more about the thermodynamic characteristics of the developing funnel. Unfortunately, TOWER couldn’t accurately record an essential metric—absolute pressure. In the rush to prepare for the season, Tim didn’t have time to install a dynamic pressure-reduction port. This would have allowed the barometer to measure something other than the pressure exerted on the sensor by the wind. Without the port, getting absolute pressure is akin to taking the temperature of a kitchen while holding a thermometer directly above the heated stovetop. “Every year we spent half of the season getting ready for the season,” Laubach says. “Fixing shit, working on shit, missing days, missing tornadoes.”
By 2011, TWISTEX’s third season on Storm Chasers, tardy funding isn’t their only gripe. The producers’ contrivances have become more and more brazen. “If they weren’t happy with a scene,” Grubb says, “they’d make us redo it. We were at their mercy.” The producers even try to feed Tim lines, according to Kathy and others. “He didn’t like that at all,” she says.
Worse are the expository after-action interviews, during which a member of the Discovery crew would pull Carl, Grzych, or Laubach aside and attempt to coax out criticisms of fellow teammates. Harmony, after all, doesn’t make for a good story line, while conflict breeds narrative. On national television, Carl declares more than once that Tim’s overcaution is costing them probe deployments.
But Carl, too, feels the team’s frustrations. In private conversation, he confides to a girlfriend, Melissa Daniels, that he feels manipulated, like a puppet being pulled about by its strings. One evening, they attend a concert in Carmel Valley, California, where the composer Philip Glass plays a piece from The Truman Show, a film about an insurance agent living in a small-town idyll, only to discover that he is the unwitting star of the world’s most popular reality television show. Carl tells Daniels he can relate.
More than sowing discord within the ranks of TWISTEX, the show runners have succeeded in drawing the team’s ire upon themselves. When Finley and Lee approach Tim’s truck to consult with him on a coming deployment, a producer attempts to hustle them away, grousing that they’re ruining the shot. Tim is apoplectic. “This is a science mission first,” he lectures. “Don’t you be shooing our people away.”
Laubach sees the pressure wearing on him. “I’d never seen Tim really, truly annoyed before. Like, I’m fucking over this thing.” The show and the mission to which Tim has dedicated his life feel increasingly at odds.
The event that epitomizes the growing gulf between research and reality television comes when the models indicate a potential outbreak in the southeastern United States in late April 2011. Despite Dixie Alley’s abundance of exceptionally powerful tornadoes, the Southeast is not a region in which TWISTEX customarily operates. The storms often course across the knotty landscape at up to highway speeds, turbocharged by a 150-mile-per-hour jet stream. If the screaming pace of the storms doesn’t make it difficult enough to keep up, the hills and trees render southeastern tornadoes nearly impossible to track. In such terrain, Tim would normally turn to radar for guidance. But wireless coverage is spotty at best; the backwoods can be a data black hole. And
