What happened to Josh Harris from Deadliest Catch? He was gone before the season aired
Josh Harris inherited the Cornelia Marie on camera and spent fifteen years as one of Deadliest Catch's most-seen faces. Then Discovery cut him, and the next season simply arrived without him in it.
Deadliest Catch has a long habit of explaining its absences on screen, sometimes in the most painful way available. Josh Harris got no explanation at all.
He arrived on the show in season 3 in 2007 as a deckhand on his father's boat, the F/V Cornelia Marie. When Phil Harris suffered a stroke during opilio season on 29 January 2010 and died on 9 February, Discovery aired it: " Redemption Day" ran on 13 July 2010 to 8.5 million viewers, a network record at the time. Josh stayed on, took the Cornelia Marie's wheelhouse alongside Casey McManus from season 10 in 2014, and ran up more than 200 episodes plus a spinoff, Deadliest Catch: Bloodline, which ran three seasons.
What ended it
In September 2022, RadarOnline published court records from a case in the late 1990s in which Harris, then 16, pleaded guilty to reduced charges — fourth-degree assault and communicating with a minor for immoral purposes — and was sentenced to 30 days' confinement on each count plus 24 months of supervision.
Read more: What happened to Jake Harris from Deadliest Catch? The internet keeps killing him off
Discovery's response was immediate and short.
"We've been made aware of this issue. Josh will not appear in future episodes of this series," a Discovery representative said in 2022.
Bloodline was pulled from Discovery+ entirely, all three seasons, and has not returned to streaming.
The boat and the co-captain went too
The network declined to renew contracts across the board, which took out people who had nothing to do with the reporting. Casey McManus said so on Twitter in December 2022.
"Discovery did not renew contracts with the boat, nor Josh, nor I. It was a bummer deal, but there's no crab to catch anyways."
That last clause is doing real work. Alaska had closed the Bering Sea snow crab fishery in October 2022 for the first time in its history after a population collapse, so the fleet the show films was already facing a season with nothing to pull. McManus moved to tugboats and posted about it on Instagram: "The new job is bigger than just running a boat... It's a new world, but a boat is a boat, and I know boats."
What the show did about it on screen
Nothing. Season 19 premiered in 2023 with no Cornelia Marie in the fleet, no reference to why, and no farewell package of the kind the series had built for Phil. Harris's last appearances are in season 18. He deleted an Instagram account with more than 130,000 followers and has kept out of public view since; he is married with a daughter.
- Seasons 3–18 — Josh Harris on screen, deckhand to captain.
- September 2022 — the reporting, and Discovery's statement.
- December 2022 — McManus confirms the boat and both captains are out.
- 2023 — season 19 airs without them.
- May 2026 — season 22 premieres with the Cornelia Marie back in the fleet, under a different captain.
That last one is the detail worth sitting with: the boat got a second act. Jake Anderson runs it now.
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