Lately I find myself watching a lot of nature shows. I’m not sure why. I like nature in many of its forms (except the many-legged forms that crawl up the back of your neck, or the particularly slimy forms), but I like it in its… well, natural setting. Not mediated by a cathode ray tube. But nature shows are a bit of a guilty pleasure, especially since the same guy has been doing all the narration for every nature show that’s been done since 1968.
And with 238 channels, there’s a lot more nature shows than there used to be. I’d love to see the NRA do one. Can’t you just picture the voiceover? “Here we see a majestic flock of cranes. Every year, the crane, following a deep biological imperative, comes in large numbers to this marsh to nest and to mate. And if you think they look noble now, you ought to see them with a belly full of twelve-gauge shot.”
Even Lifetime could get in on the act. They could send a pack of women into the middle of Macy’s, accompanied by a camera crew. And hounds. They’d have to have a narrator, too. “Sparky has just flushed two microsuede blazers out of a clearance rack.”
Then again, maybe the reason we have so much nature on television is because there seems to be so little of it everywhere else. Our towns and cities, to say nothing of the exurbs, have very little left by way of open space or nature. That makes it difficult to “get back to nature,” unless your idea of nature is watching the migration of the taxis, or the stockbrokers swimming upstreet to spawn. (more…)