Tonight on Animal Planet: The season 3 finale of Meerkat Manor. This week in the print TIME: I look at the tearjerking bloodbath that the series has become–Shakespeare! Flower! Mozart!–and what it is about this particular animal and this particular show that inspires such passionate, interactive mourning. As in:
And I’d link to the article, except that time.com appears to have, um, lost this week’s issue of TIME. No, not really, but apparently there is some issue of the website not having received the “electronic data dump” of the magazine’s contents. (Henceforth I will refer to all my writing as an “electronic data dump.”) When it’s up, I’ll link. [Update: It’s up.] In the meantime, here’s an excerpt, typed in the old-fashioned, live-meat way with my analog fingers:
Like the meerkats, Manor is an odd beast. The crew is forbidden to intervene, and the producers don’t sugarcoat the animals’ less cuddly habits (infidelity, abandonment of young, occasional cannibalism). But the meerkats are named and given human traits (“courageous,” “caring,” “bully[ing]”), and their antics and tragedies take place over a sound track. Manor is both brutal and melodramatic and thus more devastating than most documentary or scripted drama. Imagine Brothers or Sisters if, every once in a while, Sally Field, Rob Lowe or someone got eaten by a goshawk.
What I was going after in those last two sentences, but didn’t have a lot of room for, is the weird hybrid nature of the show. On the one hand, it uses many of the emotional and narrative devices of scripted drama: depicting “characters,” structuring the story (and rearranging timelines, even) to create arcs, using music and narration and stirring images to go for the heartstrings.
But at the same time, it presents the ugliness of wild life, and the arbitrariness of wild death, as a nature documentary does: if a meerkat gets bitten by a cobra or killed by a jackal, it’s not because it was dramatically foreshadowed or because it completes some classical story of tragedy or the closure of their character’s journey. They just die because something killed them. You have none of the comforting familiarity that fiction provides, the sense of order and purpose within a fictional universe. They die like animals, yet you feel for them like (fictional) humans. The only TV dramas that come close to portraying death this arbitrarily are cable dramas like The Sopranos.
After Meerkat Manor tonight, by the way, Animal Planet debuts Orangutan Island, another docu-reality-drama, this time about young orangutans being introduced to the wild. All the emotion and drama of Meerkat Manor, but with animals that look ten times more like people! Stay strong.