What’s on my mind this week? How about my favorite TV shows where nothing ever happens. I’ve written about some of these shows before but thought I’d give them another look to see if anything has changed. This is a genre full of reality “Documentary” shows. When I’m by myself and working on my art I often like to put something on to keep me company. It can’t be something that compels me to watch it or I won’t get any work done. So usually it’s something I can mostly listen too. I’m a fan of history and a fan of documentaries so I put on a lot of those. But there seems to be fewer and fewer actual documentaries on and more and more of those supernatural or mystery documentary style reality shows. They’re not really documenting anything but whatever the hosts are doing in the show. I also call them “Good shows to nap to” and I have napped to them because I can fall asleep and not miss anything.
First on the list is “Finding Bigfoot”. They’re on season six with this show and they still haven’t found Bigfoot. That’ll tell you right there that there is nothing going on. Well not really nothing. The four hosts go out into the woods in various parts of the world and scream and howl in an attempt to find Bigfoot. There are three Bigfoot believers and one sceptic. I gotta figure that’s about the ration you’d need to go hunting for Bigfoot because any more skeptics on the team and they probably wouldn’t even bother. I laugh at the show all the time when they tell us all about “Typical Bigfoot behavior”. They can’t even find one but they know all about its behavior. Cracks me up every time. At least “Finding Bigfoot” is fairly entertaining. They’re mostly out in the woods having a good time.
Next up is “Curse of Oak Island”. This one is in its second season and I think it has ten or so episodes a season. Oak Island is home of “The Money Pit”. That’s a place where supposedly someone at some time in the past buried a secret treasure. It’s the Arc of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Crown Jewels of Scotland, Shakespeare’s secret manuscripts, or your basic pirate’s treasure. It could be anything. The problem is the no one has ever found treasure on Oak Island. The whole thing is probably just a myth but that hasn’t stopped people from digging there. Lots of people over the last hundred years have dug there to no avail. So much of the island has been dug up that no one is even sure where the original spot the treasure was supposed to be is. This show is all about the current people who are digging on the island. So far after twenty episodes or so they have found no treasure. They have found a couple of small things like an old Spanish coin of the wrong age (there have been people on the island for hundreds of years) and some old wood but it had lead them no where. I think they’d have more fun looking for Bigfoot.
“America Unearthed” in another of my background shows. This one can occasionally have some actual interesting history in it though. It stars a forensic geologist who travels around the USA looking for bits of history that have gone unreported. Y’know, the Knights Templar and such came to the US and know one really knows about it but they left evidence behind. They’re on season three with this one with about ten shows a season. Sometimes the show is interesting and sometimes ridiculous. It’s more evidence based than the first two shows but sometimes it goes out into speculation-ville and never comes back.
I’ve tried out a couple of new background TV shows recently and they’ve been a little lacking. The first is “Finding Giants”. It’s in it’s first season and is all about a couple of brothers who have decided to hunt down the legends of giants and prove they are real. Yes, they believe that a race of really big humans existed in the US and there is evidence of them. They track down a bunch of old newspaper articles and go to the places they were written about. That is a really thin premise. There is not much going on in this show at all so it’s mostly the same thing over and over. Hey, let’s track down this lead. Wait we found nothing. Oh well.
There was another show that I had on in the background for a bunch of episodes but it was too insipid for my taste. I can’t even remember its name since I don’t have any of the episodes hanging around. It was “Hidden History” or some such. There are a lot of shows with similar names so who knows which one it was. But it was one of those kinds that deals with three or four different mystery stories in an hour. At least the shows I mentioned have to construct some kind of story for their hour but this one just hits the highlights of “The Shroud of Turin”, “The Holy Grail”, or some other mystery. It’s the fluffiest of the fluff shows and even as background made me turn it off.
One of the type of shows that I don’t like and never have on in the background are those ghost hunting shows. They always turned me off and I only recently was able to suss out why. I blame it on bad storytelling. There are two different type of ghost hunting shows. Type one has a person sitting there and telling you their ghost story that is reenacted by the show. Problem is that usually the person is just an average person and not a good storyteller. So they’re telling you a boring story and then showing it to you. Yawn. The other type is ghost hunters going into some old building late at night and filming dust particles. At least with “Finding Bigfoot” you get nice locations. But with ghost hunting the locations are all the same. Dark rooms.
So there are some of this years background shows for you. Oh yeah, and I’m still watching a ton of YouTube comic book haul videos. Those are always good.
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