I must be quickly descending into grumpy old man-hood, because it seems that virtually any show I see anymore on the Mississippi River is disappointing. Wild Mississippi on Nat Geo Wild is just the latest effort that made me cranky.
Narrated by a poor man’s Sam Elliott (is that accent real?), the basic narrative for the three hour mini-series goes like this: nature can be brutal; sometimes animals kill each other for food; flooding can kill animals, too (much of the filming happened during the high water days of 2011).
Now you can just turn down the volume and watch the pretty pictures, which is something I really wished I’d done. The camera work is amazing, with many shots that left me wondering how they managed to do it, but, be warned, there are also many shots of animals eating other animals, including a surprisingly graphic sequence of wolves eating a deer, which is probably something I shouldn’t have watched while eating my own dinner. (At least I wasn’t eating venison at the time.)
The documentary employs an overly dramatic narrative about the life and death of animals along the river, with more contrived drama than Big Brother. There are enough attributions about the feelings and motivations of animals to make even the most strident animal rights activists cringe (fish are afraid when a predator is near!) At least I know where some of those unemployed soap opera writers ended up.
I understand that producers take liberty with the facts when constructing a narrative for a film like this, but, as someone who knows the river fairly well, I object when the story being presented implies they are on one part of the river but the images are from somewhere else. This happens several times in the documentary.
I’m not going to fact-check the whole show, but I need to point out a major error. In trying to dramatize the severity of spring flooding, they stated that the folks in Davenport, Iowa had prepared for a river level of 24 feet but that the river was already at 26 feet and rising, which would have been a new record for Davenport. In fact, the Mississippi River actually crested at 20.7 feet in 2011, which was just the sixth highest level at Davenport.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that the national media are paying attention to the Mississippi River, but is it too much to ask that they actually get some things right? Am I wrong to expect that a show on a National Geographic network have both compelling photography and decent (mostly accurate) narration? Wild Mississippi scores highly on the former but fails utterly with the latter.
Now get off my grass and move on.
© Dean Klinkenberg, 2012
