A short rant and critique for you today…
Season two of Doomsday Preppers launched Tuesday January 31st and it’s always fun to bash survival shows when they come out. So that means it’s a second year of being disgusted and not being able to stop watching at the same time. However, there are lessons to be learned for everyone.
Doomsday Preppers makes me think a NATGeo Exec said, “Let’s do a show about survivalists, but throw in MTV Cribs and give it a game show feel. Survivalists will love it and everyone else will tune it to watch crazy people do crazy things.”
What really irks me about the show are two things. First, there is very little debate or focus on the positive aspects of preparedness. Second, all of the guests on the show focus on one dramatic event. Sensational for TV viewers, but it does little in the way of fostering an intelligent conversation.
Something that really bothered me about the first episode were things that happened with the couple from Texas that built their house out of shipping containers. The couple backed up 100 yards from their home and shot at it to test the strength of their home. First, someone changed the sound from the gun. Two .22 caliber rifles for the test. However, the sound was not from a .22 caliber rife. I won’t say I could place what caliber was used, but it sounded like a much larger rifle and was overworked in a sound studio. That caliber of rifle is also a rather useless test of a structure’s strength. Standard masonry bricks will stop a .22. Show them shooting at their house with AR-15s in .223/5.56 and it would be a more practical test.
The critiques at the end of each segment are good–for the most part. Unnamed judges give feed back on what the guest are doing right and what they are doing wrong. What I would really love to see is more consistency in the way guests’ preps are measured. The standards seem to change often and not necessarily relative to the disaster scenario being presented. It would also be nice to know who exactly is doing these critiques and what their background is.
At the end of the day the show is entertaining to watch. And there is good information that can be taken away from the show for the complete novice and seasoned pro. Just don’t expect it to move the conversation forward or convince people that do not prep that they should. If anything, the show will just leave non-preppers continuing to think that preppers are crazy.
As a side note: The next season of The Walking Dead airs Sunday February 12th at 8pm CST!