Doomsday Castle, et. al

[UncleJoseph]

As we all know, I'm somewhat of a prepper. Naturally, I tend to watch a lot of survival and/or prepper-type shows. The Science Channel, Discovery, National Geographic and a few others showcase a lot of these shows as "educational." Over the last year or so, I've really become irritated at how "educational" these shows really are. These television networks used to be renowned for their educational programming that didn't contain a lot of fiction. With the glut of highly successful so-called "reality" shows that contain anything but reality, the educational networks have jumped on the bandwagon and abandoned quality programming.

So enter the newer shows such as Doomsday Preppers, Doomsday Castle and a few others. Much of the content of these shows is either edited creatively or scripted, or simply takes a bunch of crazy people and showcases their absurd fears or beliefs. I have a feeling the creative editing is the main culprit in making a lot of these folks look unstable or obsessed or just plain crazy. But rather than being educational, the shows now focus on satirizing the prepper concept, or making preppers look like tin foil hat folks. I don't think this concept does any sort of positive service to preppers, and I also think it's starting to alienate the normal viewer base. Yet, these types of shows, which display absurd human behavior taken to extremes, seem to appeal to a rather large market (just not the market that actually craves educational programming).

[Serious Paul]

Honestly that sort of describes how I see reality TV-scripted to make it's message sell.

[UncleJoseph]

Honestly that sort of describes how I see reality TV-scripted to make it's message sell.

I totally agree. For a time, networks such as National Geographic, Discovery and a few others originally didn't take this route, but now it seems that everyone is capitalizing on the garbage that is "reality" TV.