Open letter to the makers of “Perfect Disaster”

So my wife and I sat down last night, glommed down on pizza, and watched the premiere of a new Discovery Channel series called “Perfect Disaster.” (Oddly enough, she had just watched a CNN special on what would constitute the perfect energy crisis, and I’ve seen promos for a similar show recently on the Weather Channel – Irwin Allen would be proud.) I’ll get into the bizarre psychology behind the sudden preponderance of shows like this another time, but for a moment let’s talk about the premiere installment of this one show. Basically, the premise of this hour-long episode was “What conditions would be necessary for a ‘super tornado’ to form near Dallas, Texas, and how much havoc could it wreak?” Not a completely uninteresting premise there. However, the show’s biggest failing was in trying to illustrate this situation through the eyes of a fictional Dallas family – the lovable working-class lout of a dad (who just happens to be an emergency management official for the city), and his all-American wife and son. Even here, we’re not doomed for disaster. Yet. Until whoever wrote the script took a goofball-sized hailstone to the head just before firing up the word processor.
Normally, I try not to be that harsh on anyone; I’m sure I’ve put some stuff on TV before that’s had people rolling their eyes. But the big problem here was just the sheer amount of cliche injected into the whole thing. Emergency Manager Dad drops his baseball-crazy son off for Cub Scouts, not having paid any heed to the already-ample weather watches and warnings on his car radio (some emergency planner, eh?). Sonny is then stranded in a vacant building because, since the den mother, or someone, was paying attention, Cub Scouts has been called off! Hilarity ensues as the kid calls his mom, who then goes to pick him up and they then become stranded in all manner of tornadic turmoil. Other cliches include: someone asking “My God, what is this one? An F6?”; giant hailstones blasting through the car windshield just as Mom leans down to look up at the sky; the car being picked up and hurled about by a small twister while Mom and Kid take shelter; and, of course, my favorite, when they try to escape in a loaner vehicle, they run out of gas! Perfect! Just add Helen Hunt. Or, better yet, Bruce Campbell.
At this point I began to give the show, and keep in mind this was the first time it had ever aired, the full double-barreled MST3K treatment, including “THERE’S A MAN ON THE WING OF THE PLANE!!” when the show tried to illustrate how the storm would affect a plane in the air. It really became quite enjoyable at the point. (At least for me; I’m not sure the Mrs. really dug the live entertainment, especially when Emergency Manager Dad tries to call his wife’s cell phone in the middle of the tornado and can’t reach her, after which I said “So much for my family. Hey, maybe there’s still time to warn my girlfriend…”)
I understand that you have to relate the information and speculation to the Human Experience (TM, pat. pend.) to connect with most of the general audience, but to do so with a series of vignettes that seem like they’re straight out of a lowest-common-denominator disaster flick just seems like it’s an exercise in shooting oneself in the foot. (The disaster flick comparison was always in the back of my mind, somewhere around the time when I blurted “Oh my God! A volcano just formed and erupted in downtown Dallas…right underneath the tornado! Airborne lava everywhere! Oh, the humanity!”) The factual and theoretical portions of the program were interesting, but that doesn’t help if the viewers are slapping their knees and laughing the whole time.
Maybe they could’ve illustrated this better with a custom-programmed version of SimCity 3000 or something.