TV Tuesday: Well, I Didn't Know That

[yourlibrarian]

Do you watch educational TV shows or documentaries? What makes these shows watchable or interesting to you? Are there particular ones that spoke to you?

Comments

[ecto_one_spengler]

I will always, ALWAYS sing the praises of How It's Made and Unwrapped, even though they're slow paced as hell sometimes, I happen to rather enjoy them. To a degree Unwrapped in particular was what made me wanna be more adventurous with my food and How It's Made is just cool.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I love educational shows. When I was little, we often had them running in the background even when we weren't sitting down to watch. It was a way of loading my database. I have a pretty good familiarity with much of Earth's flora and fauna as a result, and a good bit of history, plus a lot of other random stuff.

By now, I'm less likely to watch nature documentaries because I know most of the content already. But anything unfamiliar, with especially splendid imagery, or a narrator with a great voice, can still grab my attention. The last one was Dancing with the Birds, and even though I'm familiar with birds of paradise, there was quite a bit of new detail.

Some things are perennial favorites. Shows about dinosaurs, ice age fauna, or other extinct creatures that speculate on how they lived, with any kind of artist rendering, are worth watching because the interpretations vary. Similarly shows about how human creations would decay if humans disappeared have different projections and are fascinating. We've also watched several series on "how life on Earth evolved over time" and those are different enough to keep watching. The earliest they tend to start is the Cambrian Explosion, though, and I'd really like to see someone cover the Ediacaran Biota or earlier.

I also love how-to shows. I grew up on Crockett's Victory Garden and This Old House. It was only when someone prompted me to write about Bob Ross that I realized how much of my teaching style I absorbed from The Joy of Painting: "This is not hard. You can do anything you want with it." We still watch a lot of cooking shows. We've caught several that are basically tours of different world cuisines. Taco Chronicles leaned very heavily into the "food pr0n" concept with its sensual descriptions. High on the Hog explored how soul food developed from African cuisines, and had us running out to hunt for cookbooks with some of those recipes.

We also caught A Long Line of Ladies and several other Native American short films. Cultural stuff is often interesting to watch.

So yeah, I'll watch any documentary that touches on a favorite topic or offers something new to learn.

I don't just watch passively. All of it gets stored in ways that I can use in writing. Even if I have to look up details, just having seen something gives me lots of inspiration. I know how desert plants are engineered and how polar animals are. I know how to build a recipe from random ingredients. I know enough about world cultures that when I write aliens, they aren't Americans in funny suits, and I can write characters from other Earth cultures that are plausible enough to earn a vote of confidence from people of those cultures. So it's all useful to me.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh interesting, I hadn't heard of either show before but they sound really useful.

Re: Yes ...

[yourlibrarian]

I can relate to how information picked up along the way can be recalled more than we think. Sometimes I don't even know how it is that I know something, but I just absorbed it somewhere.

[yourlibrarian]

I watch documentaries and documentary series regularly. They're not generally first choice viewing, but although occasionally they can be, such as with the recent re-release of the Beatles documentary.

I still recall watching Ken Burns' baseball documentary with my partner, who is a huge baseball fan. While I've never cared about baseball myself, I appreciated what good storytelling could do. I thought its combination of historical setting and character explorations made for a really interesting watch.

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I am linguistic SillyPutty. Words just stick to me.

[ecto_one_spengler]

They mostly aired at weird times prior to 2015 here where I live and in previous places at like. 10am or something on weekends sometimes if I got lucky enough to get access to normal cable/satellite TV. I believe the Science Channel ran How It's Made and still kinda does, and the Food Network had Unwrapped for a while until it got cancelled :(