Very few things on television are better than the miniseries events that pop up on cable every couple months. From Life
on the Discovery Channel to America: The Story of Us
from History, these shows manage to educational and entertaining and are usually presented with beautiful images made even more amazing when viewed in HD. If you like these kinds of shows, the next miniseries event is the three night, five hour How the Earth Changed History beginning this Sunday at 8:00 on the National Geographic Channel.
The episodes are broken down by element water (Water World; Sunday at 8:00), earth (Beneath the Crust; Sunday at 9:00), wind (The Skies Above; Monday at 9:00), fire (The Gift of Fire; Monday at 10:00), and a fifth episode devoted to how we uses these elements to our advantage, and sometimes to the Earth’s detriment, called The Human Era, Tuesday at 8:00. The series follows geologist Iain Stewart (warning: he is Scottish so if you are not a fan of accents, you may want to avoid) as he goes to the ends of the Earth, from Iceland to Africa (thankfully he didn’t run into any vuvulazlas), China to South America and even a couple thousand feet under the earth to see how the elements shaped where we live as well as determine which civilizations lived and died.
Ever wonder why the Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) was called the Fertile Crescent even though all we see today is desert sand? Or why that area, and other pockets around the globe, has so much oil underneath? Or why England was the center of the industrial revolution? Or how Polynesians found their way east to islands across the Pacific when currents flowed the other way? Or what wiped out the Mayans to almost nothing? And why exactly do some of us knowingly live on earthquake fault lines? All are thanks to the events and explained throughout the miniseries.
And there was nothing Stewart wouldn’t do to get to the bottom of how the elements shaped history. He walks through a blazing fire of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. He goes down into a cave that is so hazardous, that a human would die after only thirty minutes without the proper suit on. He gets lowered a couple hundred feet into a hole, just like the natives did hundreds of years ago, as their only way to get water. He even soaks himself in naftalan which is used as a medicinal bath; naftalan is more commonly known as oil (hopefully BP doesn’t watch this segment and start suggesting that the oil bath for the Gulf Coast is a good thing).
Check out a preview from Sunday’s second episode Beneath the Crust:
after losing who had a I Came All Here Just to Lose Best Villain to Some Twelve Year Old who Looks Like a Young Ellen DeGeneres face. MTV should realize that they are losing more viewers by catering to the Twilight crowd than gaining from it. And how pathetic were all the crowd shots and they kept a heavy rotation of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Mike Tyson. Did any presenters bother to stay for the whole show? But I bet most of the viewers left too.
.
(The Dark Knight, Band of Brothers, True Blood)
was released earlier this week on blu-ray and is currently cheaper than the DVD version (which I may have more on at a later date).
. “In small towns, and along America's back roads, treasures are waiting to be uncovered--valuable relics from our history that are hidden in junk piles, buried in barns and stacked in garages. It takes experts to find them...and turn rust to riches.”
meets 
for NBC; while ABC Family offers up the 
for the 
set Pretty Little Liars. On the surface the two shows would have nothing in common, but at the heart of both shows is an overarching mystery.
, when her current character was three years old.
character. We even get a couple of Deadwood reunions in the first season of Justified most notably with Bullock trading wits one more time with Dan Dougherty who played an escaped convicted holding hostages in Bullock’s office.
![Terror Alert Level: Severe [RED]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidjcsCV5I3jWQDVTcnVoXbArSx3kHl02FZ8FkOHBBKP2w8mQulcCF614SIw1GjuB2JtKV2YcQOKXtMlnW2ulLSOvYvvXzDwZ3JF4Mlh0Dt2nfEL1oGLh0sk7O-GRHWbCPvJmMMKg/s400/small_severe.png)
on my Terror Alert Scale.
and 
” or the married couple being voiced by Mad TV’s Will Sasso and Saturday Night Live’s Molly Shannon. One you wouldn’t think in the same sentence and the other being rivals for many years (or at least their shows were). But anyways.
) who is chosen by the Devil to go up to Earth posed as a normal family and get a job from a drill company and sabotage their most sophisticated drill from reaching their homes. Naturally Balthazor has his family watch shows life 
to see how to assimilate among the humans. Though watching 
may have been a bad idea as the wacky uncle takes to eating cats.