Preppers ahead

“Doomsday Preppers” is a show aired on National Geographic, dealing with survivalists or “preppers”, a typically American subculture of people who prepare, in more or less fanciful ways, for a coming apocalyptic breakdown of society.

The show seems to morph every other season or so. I admit that the early seasons were pretty entertaining! The episodes I watched of season 4 are much more serious, with a slight tragic undertone, but probably of interest only to hardcore members of this particular subset of the population.

While the people interviewed clearly mean business, many are preparing for all the wrong things and/or have strange plans, like the retired professor who is building an above-ground concrete bunker in the form of a Platonic solid, or the family who are hiding food on their property with the aid of Biblically-inspired cryptograms. The family in California who train with the local fire brigades, fearing even worse wild fires in the future, was the most serious.

But then, I suppose some kind of infotainment factor has to be factored in by NatGeo in order not to lose viewers. Two-and-a-half stars.