I finally got around to watching the first episode of The Colony on Discovery and I have to admit that I am rather fascinated by the show. (Yes, I know that tonight is the third episode of the series but I am slightly behind in my DVR queue at the moment. Plus, it is Discovery so it is not as though the episodes are not going to be repeated ad nauseum throughout the year. This is the same network that will show the same episode of Mythbusters every week for an entire year.) The concept of the show is rather interesting: take ten people and have them recreate surviving for a few weeks in a post apocalyptic environment. This isn’t a game show. No one is being voted out. Just ten weeks of survival in urban Los Angeles.
This makes it one of the few reality shows that I have ever seen where you are quickly confronted with moral and ethical questions. The first episode starts with six people finding the designated shelter and setting up camp and gaining food and water. On the second day four others arrive and you suddenly are caught up in the very real question of whether or not you would share your resources with strangers. Some people were for it, some were against it. To be honest, I think the fact that they shared was much more because of the fact that they know that this is a television show and not reality. The cameras must create a break from the conceit of a holocaust but still it does make you ask yourself what would you do? How far would you go to protect yourself at the end of the world?
You also have to wonder about how useful you would be when the world ends. The people chosen for the show seem to have been specifically selected to be useful. You have contractors and doctors and engineers who do actual design work. Heck, they even have an ex-con, which is useful in a situation like this because he is someone who has been in a place where the niceties of society are forgotten and has learned how to survive in it. There is a noticeable lack of accountants and hairdressers and people whose main skills would be useless in this environment. Meaning, there is no equivalent of me out there. True, I am an electrical engineer and you would think that the fact that I have spent most of my career working with electric utilities would be a benefit. And it would be if you needed to create an interstate transmission system. Hooking up batteries to create a makeshift power source? I might be able to pull that off but I would need some help. Beyond that I would be pretty worthless out there.
The final point I want to make is that this show is tapping into a rather interesting aspect of the whole post-apocalyptic concept and one that has been more prevalent in recent years. The focus now is not on how the world ends but how will life be for the few people who survive. In the late 90’s when we had the films about giant asteroids threatening Earth or killer volcanoes or even The Day After the focus was really on how the story will end. Starting with The Road we have turned our attention to how will those last few survivors react. Will we be able to retain our humanity when all of society has been wiped away? Could we function without our infrastructure? It is rather fascinating that we are now very concerned with the human question of even if the world ended would the human race survive. We don’t care about the mechanism of the end, that is just window dressing. We want to know if there is hope for the human race. Will we truly be saved by the better angels of our nature? It is a fascinating question.
Tomorrow, a more light hearted look at reality shows with my review of More to Love. Stay Tuned.
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