Life After (stupid) People

There is a new show on The History Channel that I absolutely can't stand. It's called Life After People. It's based off of a two hour special that aired last year that was pretty successful. I have to admit, I watched the special and a couple of the show's episodes because I like the ideas it explores. The show seeks to investigate how long the remains of human civilization will last without humans to preserve them and how human-made landscapes with morph over time. It examines how and why structures and materials deteriorate and decay. As Spock would so aptly put it, “Fascinating.”

My beef is with the show's tone.

The music, shots, narrator and graphics are meant to portray a world without humans as creepy. It seeks to unsettle its viewers with the idea that the elements are really far more powerful than anything humans can create. Okay, maybe it's just me, but I think that portraying nature as invading and sinister is just plain wrong. Get over it folks; the Earth was here before Us and it will be here after Us. Perhaps the most horrifying example of this show trying to scare people was in a segment about Hashima, Japan, an abandoned mining city that stands of an example of “life after people.” The showed a shot of a rusted jungle gym with the distorted sound of children laughing, as if the very souls of the children who used to play there still haunt it, as if Mother Nature killed them. (Note: The mining company actually relocated all the residents of Hashima, so those kids all went on living somewhere else in Japan. In fact, they even had one of the former residents, who grew up in Hashima, on the show.)

There's also the fact that some of the stuff they talk about on the show is obvious. Just in case you didn't know, without people to replace light bulbs and run power grids, Times Square will be dark! (cue spooky radio frequency sounds).

This show has successfully shown that nature is out to get Us. It's just another great example of how people can take a great idea, chew it up, digest it, and crap it onto television.