Meerkat Manor - Season One. Out Tuesday. (********8/10)
Meerkat Manor is really, really cool. It’s a lot of things - nature show, documentary, soap opera, and a reality show rolled into one. Cambridge University has been following a family of meerkats in South Africa for the past decade, filming their every move and examining their social behaviour. You might ask, as I did, what is the point of expending that many resources just to find out how meerkats live over the course of a decade? How do you justify this to your bosses who hand out the money? And I think the researchers may have come to this conclusion also. So they decided to justify the entire experiment and at the same time actually make some money by turning the meerkat society into a reality TV show, one that runs on the Animal Planet network. Season One of that show comes out on DVD tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and I highly recommend picking it up.
Meerkats, for those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t either until I first saw this show) are tiny little animals that live in the Kalahari desert in South Africa. They are related to the mongoose, make barking noises like dogs, and live in a very complex social environment. Their society is like many human things. It’s like the mafia - you go against the family, you better look out. It’s like a street gang - rival gangs come on our turf, it’s war. It’s like a cult - the leaders are the only ones allowed to have sex, and woe unto all others who do. And it’s like one of those weird communes, where all the women take care of all the babies and breast feed them. And all of this is captured on film for the series, and delivered to us in 13 episodes in the first season of Meerkat Manor.
These creatures are awfully cute, and they have babies all the time, and those are really cute too, so there’s that. But it’s more than just cute animals doing cute things. After a while, you begin to identify with individuals in the group, cheer for them to defeat their enemies, and mourn the loss of the ones who die. (And there are some who die - after all, it is nature.) It’s like a really good, really natural, reality soap opera without irritating people. Which is terrific! Now, I watched all five hours of this show, in one night, with my girlfriend. And it does get a little repetitive. Some of the same information is bound to be repeated if you watch the entire series at once. (She said, before the final episode - I hope this wraps up nicely! And I told her that it was nature, you couldn’t really make them follow a script. And then it wrapped up with a cliffhanger! We have to get season 2 now!)
It’s narrated by Sean Astin (that other hobbit from Lord of the Rings), and he does a good job of keeping the story going when the animals can’t talk for themselves. Again, it will seem repetitive if you watch them all at once. Like hasn’t he used the phrase “discretion is the better part of valour” at least three times now? But it’s very possible that you will want to watch it all at once, because this show is addictive. Pick it up on DVD tomorrow, it’s worth your while. Oh, and your family’s too. The kids might cry a little - you know, with the deaths and all - but they’ll love it.