So much to do during Thanksgiving week. Make up the guest bedrooms. Prepare the dinner. Eat the leftovers. Nap. Eat more leftovers. Nap. Repeat for six or seven days. In short, no time to watch any television, except maybe a football game.
Network
executives appear to fear just that, and so they are countering the
tryptophan-induced indifference with the only surefire enticement they
can think of: animals. A ridiculous number of animal-related shows will
be clogging television in the next few days, these among them:
“The Whale: Revenge From the Deep”
“The Jellyfish: Revenge From Just a Few Feet Offshore”
“Fox’s Cause for Paws: An All-Star Dog Spectacular”
“Fox’s Cause for Claws: An All-Star Cat Spectacular”
“Fox’s Cause for Gnaws: An All-Star Rodent Spectacular”
“Big Cat Week: Man v. Lion”
“Big Cat Week: Leopard — Ultimate Survivor”
“Big Cat Week: Future Cat”
“Big Cat Week: Alternate-Universe Cat”
“Big Cat Week: Cats Watching Big Cat Week”
“Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever”
“Grumpy Cat: Not Big Enough to Be a Big Cat”
“National Dog Show Presented by Purina”
“National Turkey Show Presented by Butterball”
“When Turkeys Attack”
“When Turkeys Attack Grumpy Cats”
“How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth”
“What?? We’re Trying to Clone a Woolly Mammoth???”
“The Sturgeon Queens”
Oh, all right, only 10 of the above are actual shows, and “The Sturgeon Queens” isn’t really about sturgeon, it’s about Russ & Daughters,
the Lower East Side specialty food store, which has a lot of smoked
fish in it. But you get the idea: When in doubt as to whether anyone
wants to watch TV, put on a show about or featuring animals.
No
critic could possibly watch all the animal shows that are crammed into
the next few days, so you’ll read nothing further here about “The
Sturgeon Queens” (Channel 13, next Tuesday; WLIW21, Dec. 3), “Fox’s Cause for Paws: An All-Star Dog Spectacular”
(Thanksgiving night), “The Whale: Revenge From the Deep” (a
“Moby-Dick”-like Animal Planet movie Wednesday night), NBC’s coverage of
the National Dog Show (noon on Thanksgiving), the woolly mammoth
cloning thing (Smithsonian Channel, Saturday night) or the “Leopard —
Ultimate Survivor” installment of Nat Geo Wild’s Big Cat Week (Saturday
night). Instead, you’ll have to settle for a paragraph or two about the
four shows this critic was able to choke down.
‘BIG CAT WEEK: MAN V. LION’
These Big Cat Weeks (this one begins on Friday) have been around long
enough that a certain desperation is beginning to creep in. On “Man v. Lion,”
scheduled for Friday night, a tracker named Boone Smith puts himself in
an acrylic box in a South African game reserve, next to a carcass of
some deerlike beast that lions like to eat.
The
idea is to get a really, really close look at lions feeding, although
what is to be gained from this is not entirely clear. It’s not quite as
garish or exploitative as a show the Discovery Channel is planning next
month, “Eaten Alive,” in which a man tries to get himself swallowed by a giant anaconda, but it’s certainly unnecessary.
‘BIG CAT WEEK: FUTURE CAT’ Yes, this show,
scheduled for Sunday, is an hour’s worth of speculation about what
lions, tigers, cougars and such might be like in the future. Not the
near future, something we might actually care about and be able to
influence. This bit of idiocy concerns itself with the point in the
future at which the continents might have merged into one giant land
mass, or water might cover much of the planet.
In
the waterlogged version of the future, big cats, we’re told, might have
to become aquatic hunters. This leads to a bit of speculation that will
have fans of these Random Animal Weeks quivering with excitement: How
would the tigers and leopards of the distant future fare against the
sharks of the future? It’s either a Syfy movie (“Cougatron Versus
Megashark”) or a Big Cat Week/Shark Week crossover episode.
‘GRUMPY CAT’S WORST CHRISTMAS EVER’ Some people find the holidays depressing, and nothing will be more depressing than the viewership number put up by this movie,
which has its premiere on Saturday on Lifetime. Grumpy Cat is a
real-life animal that has become Internet-famous entirely because of her
perpetual sourpuss, and here she gets her own movie, with Aubrey Plaza of “Parks and Recreation” providing her voice.
It’s
a seasonal story involving a friendless girl, a pet store, a mall
robbery and an ugly-sweater contest, and it’s full of self-referential
wisecracks, with Grumpy frequently addressing viewers directly and
strongly implying that they’re pathetic for watching. But watch they
will, no doubt by the millions. The movie is actually rather amusing if
you have cat video standards, and Ms. Plaza seems to be having a droll
time. Still, afterward we are all going to have to face the fact that we
live in a country where a large number of people spent the Saturday
night of a four-day weekend watching this thing.
‘WHEN TURKEYS ATTACK’ The Grumpy Cat movie, though, is an intellectual feast compared with this show,
which Destination America offers on Wednesday night, presumably to
encourage you to put a little extra bite into that turkey leg the next
day. The show is nothing more than a collection of amateur videos of
turkeys getting riled. They knock down children. They terrorize people
in cars. They chase gray-haired ladies. What are they so angry about?
Presumably it’s that, even in a week defined by turkey, cats get most of
the attention.
