Thoughts on the Doomsday Preppers Series

I wrote a couple of articles on the Doomsday Preppers series that began airing on NatGeoTv about a month ago and I’m really pretty down on the show. I’ve watched the first few episodes more than once and I think it’s really a shame the way the producers have chosen to portray Preparedness. It appears that they are choosing which people to highlight based solely on shock value. This wouldn’t surprise me if the show was on Fox or one of the other networks that love to air mindless dribble but National Geographic putting out this crap? They should really be ashamed of themselves.

There was a real opportunity here for NatGeo to highlight the risks posed by:
Economic collapse, common natural disasters, widespread power outages, or a disruption in the general food supply, just to name a few. And to help the general public to understand how to be prepared to weather these disasters should the time come. A well-produced show that portrayed a prudent and reasonable approach to preparedness could have educated millions of people. Of these millions I would think that more than a few would, at some point, benefit from what they had learned and that lives could even be saved.

Unfortunately, every episode I’ve seen has focused on people who are a) planning for major catastrophes that have a low probability of affecting them and b) who are obsessed with one aspect of preparedness and woefully underprepared in most other areas. Many of the people featured also seem (to my eye) to be struggling with some mixture of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Perhaps prepping is therapeutic for them? That could be but it still doesn’t excuse the misinformation coming from this show and the lost opportunity to help people who would like to prepare to do so wisely.

Seriously, who is running National Geographic these days? Barnum & Bailey?

~Butch