When I brought home Sex And The City on DVD, my girlfriend said “oh, cool”. When I brought home The Visitor, she said “will that make me cry?” and decided not to watch it. And when I brought home The Go-Getter, she said “why do you watch this crap?” (The Go-Getter, incidentally, was not crap – it was very good.) But when I brought home Meerkat Manor: Season Two, she said “oh my God, YAY!” I’m not even joking. And ten minutes later, we were watching the first episode of the second season. And seven hours after that, we were watching the final episode of the second season. Because Meerkat Manor is, really, that compelling. Alliance Films releases season two on October 7th, and it is well worth picking up.
Now, I may just be a morbid guy. Or perhaps I am cruel and mean-spirited. But when I watch nature documentaries, like Meerkat Manor, I want to see animals eat other animals. That’s just what I enjoy watching. And aside from the dominant meerkat, Flower, inexplicably attacking a bird, we see very little of it. There are hard-fought battles between meerkat tribes, battles that leave meerkats dead, and often the babies as well. One of the meerkat babies gets eaten by a goshawk. But we don’t get to see that. The program is all about the “real life and death” events in the Kalahari, but we don’t get to see the cool stuff. I guess it’s a way to keep the series PG-rated. There is even a scene where the group of meerkats surrounds a cobra, keeping it at bay before they finally abandon it to it’s fate as a snake-eating eagle circles overhead. So…what happened to the snake? Did it get eaten? We never find out. Come one Animal Planet. At least show a snake getting eaten.
Despite the fact that the truly violent parts of the show are edited out, this program is still ridiculously compelling. It contains all the cliffhangers and the emotional moments you would associate with soap operas. Only instead of terribly attractive awful actors, this one stars tiny little cute meerkats. My girlfriend is right. Yay!