FUNNY THING ABOUT ROWE (and there are many): He's "profoundly incompetent" at skilled labor. This was embarrassing for him as a kid. He grew up in the rural outskirts of Baltimore, and his paternal grandfather, who lived next door, was a formative presence—a master carpenter, plumber, and electrician who built the house where Rowe grew up. "My dad was his apprentice, essentially," Rowe says. "Between the two of them, they would fix anything in the neighborhood. They would wake up clean and come home dirty, and some problem had been solved. But I missed that gene. So by the time I got old enough to think about how I was going to make a living, I decided to go as far from that as I could."

That meant English and communication degrees from two local colleges, then dreams of acting. A search for a back door into the Screen Actors Guild led Rowe to try out for the Baltimore City Opera in 1984. He memorized the shortest aria he could, crashed an audition, and got in. He ended up staying for five years—though not for the artistic thrill. "I'm one of two straight, unmarried guys in a troupe with 35 women," he explains. "I'm 23, dressed as a pirate, all the girls are dressed like French prostitutes, and there's Wagner and Verdi and Puccini playing. It was a hell of a thing."

He finally left in 1989, when a bartender bet him that he couldn't pass an audition for the shopping network QVC. He was hired on the spot as the midnight-to-three host, then fired three months later when cameras cut to him humiliating a collectible nun doll. (He swears he was looking for the winder.) "I was hired and fired from there a few times," he boasts. "And the reason I kept coming back, even though I was in constant trouble, was that it was an extraordinary training ground. Live TV, no script, three hours a night. By the time I left for good, in '93, I had a trade."

A freelance trade was exactly what Rowe needed if he was going to follow his career model, Travis McGee, the fictional hero of novelist John D. MacDonald's long-running series. McGee is a private detective who works only when necessary, then spends the rest of his time traveling on his houseboat until the money runs out. Rowe discovered the books when he was 18 and has spent most of the time since then trying to carve out a life based on the same philosophical underpinnings: work as an adventurous means to an end. "McGee was an advocate of taking his retirement early and in installments," Rowe says. "I thought, Wouldn't it be interesting if I could take that model and apply it to freelance work in television?"

In the decade between his final QVC firing and the start of Dirty Jobs, Rowe hosted a regional real estate show, a failed Discovery Channel program called Romantic Escapes, local shows in San Francisco, even in-flight travel videos for American Airlines. The jobs kept him home for weeks, sometimes months, then he'd meet up with an evolving group of mostly Australian friends and travel the world—often on the first-class, free-to-anywhere card that he had secretly hung on to after the American Airlines job ended.

In 2003, he tried to turn his wanderlust into another job with Discovery. "I wanted to go to Everest, the Titanic. I had about 30 places I wanted to make shows out of," he recalls. Discovery said yes. But first they wanted a simpler, short-run show to reintroduce him to viewers. So after a brainstorming session at Grumpy's, he pitched them Dirty Jobs. "They were like 'Eh, it's a talk show in a sewer,' " he says, "but we got it on the air, and people watched. They asked for three more episodes. I said, 'No. Titanic.' And they said, 'Just three more.' We did them, and the show blew up."