Previewing Expedition Week

With its successful Shark Week, you knew it would only be a matter of time before other cable channels would be following the Discover Channel’s lead an devote a whole week to specific targets. Starting this Sunday, the National Geographic Channel launching their Expedition Week which looks to solves some of the biggest questions archeologist have been trying to solve for decades, if not centuries. Each night features a new program specifically for the event. Here is what you can expect (the new programs start at 9:00 PM unless otherwise noted:

Sunday, November 16
Unlocking the Great Pyramid: They start off the week with the best of the new programming. This is mostly because the program is narrated by the guy leading the expedition who is legitimately excited about the findings and not narrated by someone disembodied voice of your high school science teacher.

Monday, November 17
Direct From the Moon: Don’t have much on this but it looks like someone is looking to colonize the moon, if only for a month at a time. Here are a couple of pictures from the episode:





Tuesday, November 18
Shipwrecked! Captain Kidd: Here’s one that can’t wait until the next Pirates of the Caribbean. Apparently some of the pirate lore comes from Kidd, and of course there may be some hidden booty, even though he was on the British payroll.

Wednesday, November 19
The Real George Washington: Maybe the least interesting because it seems like we already know everything there is to know about the first president. And the few things that they uncover are not the interesting or that groundbreaking.

Thursday, November 20
Lost Cities of the Amazon: Put the kiddies to bed early this night because it is National Geographic in the Amazon so there is plenty of gratuitous nudity of tribal men and women and like the magazine none of it is at all sexual. But there are plenty of interesting theories of if and who huge tribe could have survived in the middle of a tropical jungle.

Friday November 21
Egypt Unwrapped: Alexander the Great’s Lost Tomb: The double feature of two Egypt programs starts at 8:00 featuring a tomb that was once a tourist attraction in the ancient world but have today’s archeologist puzzled to its whereabouts that have taken tomb seekers across Egypt and parts of Europe.

Egypt Unwrapped: Mystery of the Screaming Man: The Egypt episodes are easily the best of the bunch and here in another entertaining one. It is probably not a good sign your mummified corpse was frozen in a scream, but adding to this mysteries the lack of a name to go along with the tomb he was found in. And much like many of today’s mysteries, this one might be solved with a CAT scan.

Sunday November 23
Egypt Unwrapped: The Scorpion King: I have not much on this that airs at 8:00 but who know that the movie was based, if very, very loosely, on a real person?

Herod’s Lost Tomb: Who knew King Herod was such an accomplished architect? I guess when you are primarily know as a killer and your must impressive works don’t stand the test of time either by erosion or invaders tearing your work down. And even when you construct your own expansive tomb, apparently if you are extremely cruel to you people, they don’t honor your burial very much.