National Geographic documentary MO

* MO - modus operandi

One day some years ago I watched a National Geographic documentary about a meteorite that supposedly had fallen somewhere in the Amazon jungle. The story started with the explorers swimming up the river in boats - and that was pretty much all that the documentary showed. In the last few minutes they finally arrived at the spot, took a look around, noticed all the trees and decided that, indeed, there was a crater but it was now so overgrown that it was no longer possible to investigate anything.

So, basically, in a documentary about a meteorite crater all I really saw was a bunch of guys roughing it in the wild and getting nowhere.

If you think this was a one-off fail, how about this one: In an NG documentary about sequoias - and, again, I wanted to find out something about the subject - there were two storylines. One was about a photographer that was contracted to photograph one of the trees. The other was about two naturalists who were supposed to do some scientific investigation there. The photographer was climbing some ropes to take pictures from the roots to the top. I saw some pretty good close-ups of his brand-new camera. The naturalists, a couple, could have gotten there in a car in a day but they loved trees so much that they decided to go on foot through the forest, which would take them two weeks.

Up to around the second commercial break there was very little about the sequoias themselves beyond how tall and how old they were. But that I already knew - that's why I wanted to know more. I lost my patience and changed the channel, so perhaps there actually was something more relevant later on. I think though that if a documentary doesn't show you something interesting in the first few minutes, it never will.

Third time wasn't the charm either. A documentary about the secrets of cats seemed like a treat. I love cats, in fact I am servant to one (a note to dog people: this is an in-joke). So I watched an American geneticist go to Egypt to find some cats that would be as close as possible to their feral ancestors. Now, I can hardly find any other term to describe it but a show of stupidity. Imagine a lady with PhD going around Egypt's backwater (or is it backsand?) villages and trying to communicate with gestures and slowly-spoken English words what she wanted of the locals. Because finding an English-speaking guide must be hard in Egypt, what with all the tourists and archaeologists and whatnot visiting the country all the time. And because by the time you get your PhD you don't have any brain cells left. Hello?

It was about then that I gave up on NG documentaries, but I still couldn't fathom why they even bothered to produce this crap. I understood this later thanks to my mother's complaints about home-makeover shows. She kept complaining about how they never show any good image of the finished rooms at the end. Instead, they show a few brief flashes, and not even wide-angle ones, but concentrate home owners' reactions.

I got it then: All this stuff is not about what the title says. It's about adventure and emotions. Facts don't sell; emotions sell. Such pity they disguise one thing as something else altogether. And I see more and more shows applying the same MO.

Could I please have some honest-to-goodness documentaries back?