Last year, I wrote one of the first reviews of Discovery’s post-apocalyptic reality show The Colony. That meant my post got indexed highly in whatever system search engines use to index articles, so a year later, you’re still likely to come up with it when you search on “The Colony reviews.” And that in turn means that I have become aware, through my blog-referrer logs, that a lot of people out there are very intensely interested in The Colony. As I write this, my year-old post is the second-most-read post on Tuned In, the post gets regular traffic even when the show is not on the air, and there are still comments and arguments being added to it, even now, as if its comments section is itself the remnants of a postapocalyptic civilization, living on in the smoldering wreckage of my long-abandoned post.
All of which suggests another quick look at The Colony, which is back on Discovery, and aired last night.
My basic impression of the show hasn’t changed: it’s contrived, as reality shows are, which is reasonable, since there’s no way of reproducing the actual feeling of having survived the death of civilization. Taken on those terms, though, it’s a pretty fascinating contrivance, and one that clearly scratches an itch a lot of us are feeling, with recent years’ headlines of global cataclysms or the possibility thereof.
I do wish the producers had taken more steps to distinguish season two from season one. The pretend-calamity this season was a biological epidemic, as it was last year; it would have been interesting to see the colonists dealing instead with, say, nuclear winter—though that would have been more of a production challenge to reproduce. (Caveat: I haven’t been watching regularly this season, so there may be other worthwhile changes I haven’t picked up on.)
But there is a different setting this year, and with it, last night, came an inadvertent reminder that real-life disaster goes on in ever more forms. The “survivors” this year are holed up on the gulf coast of Louisiana, and in this episode, they emerged to find that their nearby water source was poisoned and choked with dead fish—the result of a real-life oil leak that was menacing the Gulf Coast and its ecosystem.
This, mind you, was not the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster (as a post-production screen title made clear). It was just, you know, another hazardous oil spill—the kind that, apparently, is hardly even worth noting in the larger media, unless someone happens to be shooting a reality show about the end of the world nearby.
The Colony can stick to its tricks if it wants to. The real world of disaster, on the other hand, never seems to run short of new plot twists.
