September 16, 2005
On Television Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 01:30 PM EST Last evening, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about a trio of young adults on a journey to meet up with the rest of their family. They had names. They had personalities. And they had, therefore, their clashes. They had triumphs and tragedies, too, and everything else you might expect in a Southern novel. But the program was not about Raintree County, it was about Europe during the Ice Age, and the people were prehistoric. This show, The Ice World, was an example of a new generation of documentaries. It is a world quite apart from the old days of Edward R. Murrow and NBC White Paper. Nowadays, directors who are tired of scouring archives for film clips, eight seconds at a time, just hire actors and create new film, along with creating names, personalities, and suitable adventures. It all started about five years ago with computer-animated dinosaurs—and me sitting there actually feeling teary over some invented dinosaur baby getting gobbled up by a mean old big dinosaur. Isn’t that what we used to call a fairy tale? Now the new fiction has moved massively into nonfiction television. In The Ice World, one of the people was named Aki. Now, who on earth knows what prehistoric people called each other? Aki seems an awful lot like a modern version of a primitive name. Who is to say that a cave man couldn’t be named Maximilian? There isn’t anything wrong with not knowing every detail of human history. But there is something very wrong with filling in facts—except in fairy tales.
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