The people who make science shows face a formidable challenge: science itself isn’t that interesting to watch. Would you want to watch an bunch of astronomers sitting around a room calibrating a telescope for an hour? No way! You want to see supernovas and asteroids and the USS Enterprise. Unfortunately, that challenge leads to some pretty suspect programming. Here are five such shows that appear to exploit “science” for the sake of entertainment:
By day, they’re ordinary Chicago police officers. By night, they’re paranormal cops. Meaning, they switch from investigating crimes actually committed by people to crimes committed by ghosts. In the pilot episode, a woman calls the Paranormal Cops when her houseguest is choked by “an unseen force.” It’s like Ghostbusters, except real, except also fake, being that ghosts are not real.
Plenty of shows explore how the apocalypse could unfold. This one takes a more practical approach—instead of “What will happen?” The Colony asks, “How can we survive it?” To answer that, they’ve selected a team of specialists, put them in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment (in this case, a warehouse on the LA river) and tasked them with rebuilding society. The show’s overall message: you can survive the apocalypse as long as you’re friends with a doctor, a nurse, a self-defense expert, a building contractor, an alternative energy guru, a machinist, an IBM scientist, and an aerospace engineer. Start making those friends now.
OK, on the surface this is just a show that looks into the physics behind various unarmed combat styles. I singled it out because of the episode called “Fight Like an Animal.” This episode wonders just how, exactly, a human would stack up against an animal competitor in a fight?
Could a krav maga expert defeat a lion? A grizzly bear? How about an orangutan? You might say we’ve known the answers to these questions since…forever, but Fight Science confirmed them: any one of those animals would tear you to pieces without even thinking about it. Just like you thought they would.
There’s nothing wrong with a show about legendary fantasy animals, like the Chupacabra, so long as that show assumes those animals are, well, fantasy. But this one sends out teams of scientists—real, credentialed scientists—to find out if those animals actually existed.
Using the most cutting edge knowledge available, along with the shadiest computer animation possible, they find out whether creatures like the Gryphon exist. And in so doing, the team gathers irrefutable evidence that their production budget would have been better spent on literally anything else.
Smash Lab is an essential entry in the “let’s destroy things and then say something science-y about it” canon. The idea for Smash Lab is thus: any vehicle or building available today has been subjected to rigorous safety testing. But they haven’t been tested for the most extreme scenarios imaginable. In one episode, the Smash Lab team investigates whether you can make a plane invulnerable to any bomb. Result: not so much. In another, they install giant airbags on the front of a train, and then crash it. Result: this caused more damage than if they hadn’t installed the airbags. In a third, they try to build an earthquake-proof house. Result: they pulled it off, only to discover their solution has been in use since 590 BC.
