It’s no secret that TV has been trying, for years to capture the quirky magic of homemade blogs and videos that go viral for no apparent reason.
Take Gangnam Style. Please.
And so TV execs spend millions to ape things that cost video bloggers 50 cents to make in their basements.
Thing is, though, the execs rarely get it right because you can’t make a four-letter blog fly on a three-letter network.
But there is one viral category that has been as sure-fire as puppies on Christmas morning: The ever-popular odd animal friends videos.
Oh, don’t even try to lie. You know you’ve seen them.
Now, TV has decided to ape the can’t-miss genre with two new shows.
Tonight at 8 on PBS’s “Nature” there’s “Animal Odd Couples,” a show so intriguing and, yes, cute, that animal lovers will be weeping with joy.
Since it’s PBS, they go beyond the usual Internet videos in which a shaky hand-held camera shows, say, a Rhodesian Ridgeback mothering a fawn while unknown people chatter in the background.
Well, actually there are plenty of shaky hand-held videos here, but they dig up fancy scientists, doctors and even Temple Grandin to give us insights into why animals cross species to make friends.
And what they come up with defies everything animal “experts” have always said. Mammals are often social animals and can be as emotional and needy as humans.
They love, they hate, they grieve, and they nurture even when nature instinctively tells them that cross-species parenting and friendships aren’t supposedly, well, natural.
On Thanksgiving, Nat Geo Wild gets into the game, too, with a two-night event, “Unlikely Animal Friends.”
In these shows, you’ll see a 16-year-old goat that spontaneously became a seeing-eye goat for a 40-year-old blind horse, a golden retriever and his best friend, a wild dolphin that he swims with for hours everyday in Ireland.
There’s a lion that mothers a coyote and a dog that raised an orphan bear cub.
Fantastic. These animals are more human than, well, you know the rest.
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As eternally grateful as I am to the management at Waterside Plaza, where I live, for opening the complex up after eight long days of their tireless work, I am not grateful to Time Warner, who (as of yesterday morning) still had not restored cable service to our area.
Therefore, if you found me drunk in a bar last night because I was forced to keep drinking to keep watching the presidential returns, I sincerely hope you put me in a cab with a note to take me home.
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Can somebody tell me what happened on “The Walking Dead” last Sunday night? Not that I’m all that intrigued with Woodbury and “The Governor.” I prefer Rick’s survivalist tribe.