“Welcome to Earth – population zero,” goes the ominous tagline at the start of every episode of Life After People, the History Channel-produced documentary series that aired its second season just recently in Canada on History Television. It’s our cue to get cozy and enjoy an hour’s worth of empty cities falling to pieces, if they’re not inundated by rivers and seas, while the pride of mankind’s achievements collapse spectacularly into piles of rubble and scrap.
The show’s formula was set in place two years ago, when the two-hour special that launched the series aired on History in the U.S. It begins with several pans of empty cities, cut with glimpses of decay and structural failure, while narrator James Lurie warns of the dismal fate awaiting the remnants of our civilization. Themes are introduced – a building, an animal, a technology, a potential threat – which are then teased out at increasing intervals, from a day to a week to a month to years and then centuries.
The “money shots” are seen fleetingly, then finally showcased at a point around two-thirds through the hour – the catastrophic collapse of some architectural or engineering landmark. The pilot special and season one took care of most of the “greatest hits,” so by season two the CGI-imagined destruction seems like clean-up work, and so we witness the demise of a radio mast in North Dakota, Norman Foster’s “gherkin” building in London, the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan and the Sydney Opera House. Poison gas leaks from railway cars left to rust on sidings, Asian carp finally make it into the Great Lakes, and Air Force One explodes on the runway where it was parked, all because humans weren’t around to do the necessary maintenance.
It’s no great stretch to realize that the show is a by-product of the latest outbreak of millennial anxiety, courtesy the (thankfully subsiding) media hysteria and political opportunism that coalesced so potently around what was called “global warming,” before it was tweaked to the far more inclusive “climate change.” Life After People was preceded by a bestselling book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and followed by a copycat special on the National Geographic Channel called Aftermath: Population Zero.
Neither the shows nor the book bother explaining why humans would suddenly vacate the planet, leaving cars on freeways, ships floating at sea, and pets locked indoors waiting for their next meal. One is forced to imagine some vast, scrupulously non-judgmental “rapture” plucking us from this existence, but only after we’ve put down our coffee cups and turned off the ignition in our cars; in any case, the whys and hows are entirely beside the point.
We are a melancholy and morbid people, and have always gotten a strange pleasure from the contemplation of ruins. Rich men once built follies on their estates, ready-made ruins that put classical or medieval remnants at the bottom of their gardens, ready for a picturesque brood in the twilight, while the middle classes contented themselves with prints by artists like Piranesi, full of fantastic views of tumbledown Rome or Athens. The poor, one presumes, didn’t need to purchase opportunities to contemplate disaster.
Like much of modern culture, Life After People lets us indulge our impulses at length, and the second season obligingly showcases the revenge of time and nature on both God and man, at the beginning and end of its 10-episode season. In Wrath Of God, the season debut, places of worship decline and fall, with special attention paid to the Shroud of Turin, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, California’s Crystal Cathedral and St. Peter’s in Rome. It’s worth noting that the targets of this wrath are exclusively Christian; no Buddhist or Hindu temple is destroyed, and considering the potential for violent controversy if the Kaabah in Mecca or Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock were seen subsiding into rubble, the show’s producers should probably regard their almost total focus on the Americas and Europe as prudent.
In the season finale, it’s our political monuments and residences that fall under time’s hammer, as the White House, the Palace of Versailles and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello all decay in the wind and rain. I have to admit that seeing the United Nations complex in Manhattan collapse inspired more joy than regret, while the fate of Mao’s corpse in its mausoleum left me unmoved.
The show tries to lunge at our heartstrings by alighting briefly on Bo, President Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dog, as he wanders the empty Oval Office before escaping the doomed building for the now-wild world outside. Don’t worry, we’re assured – Bo’s breeding as a fisherman’s helper means he’ll do fine, especially when he discovers plentiful food in the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, as Washington D.C. returns to swampland. It’s heartening to see, in the end, that one occupant of the White House has an inkling of what he’s supposed to be doing.
