OK, we agree that Deadliest Catch has no peer. That landmark Discovery Channel series, which chronicles the derring-do of commercial crab-fishing boats off the Alaskan coast, ended Tuesday, with its highest-rated episode ever.

A certain television viewer, then, the one who hates network fluff but who cautiously enjoys an informative program about life’s gritty hardships (and workaday chances for swashbuckling), may find himself with a hole in his schedule — and a quiet longing in his stoic heart.

All I am saying is: Give Ice Road Truckers a chance.

This new show, whose premiere last Sunday was the History Channel’s highest-rated debut of an original program, follows the fortunes of men who drive 18-wheelers over frozen lakes, delivering supplies to remote diamond mines in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The lakes are frozen for only 60 days a year, so the truckers don’t have much time to haul their indispensable cargo to the mines, which are inaccessible the rest of the year.

What’s more, each driver commits to as many runs as he thinks he can handle, hoping to maximize his profits (and, often, support his family for the year). This means he’s traversing the sheets of ice (on average about 28 inches thick) and risks plunging into the ice-cold water with his truck, many times over, on little sleep. Watching these guys, as tough and bedraggled as bears (one is called Polar Bear), make their runs, it’s hard not to share in their cold, fatigue and horrible highway hypnosis, that existential recognition behind the wheel late at night that the pull of sleep and the pull of death are one and the same.

Something else piques curiosity: the mine the ice-road truckers are headed for this season is De Beers’ first diamond mine outside South Africa, the Snap Lake Project, which looks like Superman’s Arctic retreat, the Fortress of Solitude. How are the South Africans finding those 30-below temperatures? I’d like to know.

This is clearly the History Channel’s bid for the Jack London set, the Outside magazine set, the Into Thin Air adventure-travel set. And it gets right exactly what Deadliest Catch got right, namely that the leave-nothing-but-your-footprints, green kind of eco-travelers are too mellow and conscientious to be interesting to watch. Instead, the burly, bearded, swearing men who blow methyl hydrate into their own transmissions and welcome storms as breaks from boredom and a chance to “go four-wheeling with a big rig” (as they put it) are much better television.

But how does the excitement we find in the adventures of these guys and the miners they serve — as well as the commercial fisherman on the Discovery Channel — comport with the efforts, expressed on other channels, to keep the seas and tundra pristine? That ideological conflict is another adventure on television.

Ice Road Truckers airs on the History Channel Sunday night at 10.