Michael B. Duff

The Discovery Channel’s post-apocolyptic reality show is in the middle of its second season. I just finished the first.

The premise is compelling. A dozen highly-skilled engineers, mechanics and medical professionals are placed in a simulated disaster setting and expected to build what they need to survive.

The first season took place in an abandoned factory in downtown Los Angeles. The second is set in a small town devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

The first step to enjoying the show is to stop worrying about “realism.” The colonists are given a perfect mix of raw materials and threatened by “gangs” that aren’t actually allowed to hurt them. In a real situation they would all be killed or enslaved in 48 hours.

But it’s not a zombie movie, it’s a stress test. It’s a social experiment designed to apply just enough pressure to keep everybody on their toes. The mauraders may be fake but the hunger, filth and dehydration are all quite real.

The show isn’t about torturing the volunteers. It’s about giving raw materials to a bunch of brilliant people and motivating them to build, watching them turn everyday objects into beds, showers, power sources and functional vehicles. It’s about the process of human invention.

Pampered products of the service economy will come away with a profound sense of helplessness and a profound respect for people who actually build things for a living.

The Colony shows us where our comforts come from. It peels away the layers of our modern society and teaches us how the components work. It really is an educational program, recommend for students of all ages, and for anyone who’s inclined to take modern comforts for granted.

Every fan of Atlas Shrugged should see this show. This is the real Galt’s Gulch, populated, not by moral supermen, but by ordinary people using knowledge and skill to improve their world. The finest minds in the building belong to a vegetarian peacenik who looks like Santa Claus and an epic level handyman with zero social skills.

In harsher conditions we might get a serious exploration of charity vs. self-interest but at this level it’s mostly just posturing. The social dynamics feel real enough — walking the line between annoyance and respect as the participants squabble, fight and second guess each other.

My favorite moment occurred early on as blue-collar handyman Michael squared off with engineers Vlad and John C. John C. and Vlad are authentic geniuses, while Michael is the penultimate example of the practical man who can get things done. The Colony needs all of them, but class distinctions get in the way. Michael feels he’s being dismissed because he doesn’t have a degree and goes on a rant about the arrogance of people with letters after their names.

The disdain is largely in his head, and he seems to get over it in later episodes, as shallow stereotypes are overcome by real respect. I paid particular attention to this moment because I think we’re going to see a lot more conflicts like this in the future, as the “service economy” loses ground.

America wasn’t built by people with desk jobs. For two centuries our greatness was fostered by people like this — people who built real things from real stuff — by engineers who found new ways to accomplish common tasks and by the craftsmen who made it all work.

These people deserve our respect, more respect than they’re getting, in an age when everybody wants to be a banker or a rock star. The Colony is a celebration of human ingenuity and hard work. The thugs may be fake, but the good guys are real.

Long live The Doctor!

My first exposure to Doctor Who was the 1996 TV movie by Philip Segal. It was a noble effort that ultimately failed to rekindle the series.

The real rebirth happened in 2005, under the guiding hand of Russell T. Davies. That era comes to a close tonight as Davies wraps up his assorted storylines and David Tennant ends his spectacular career as the Tenth Doctor.

Although the story premises are radically different, emotionally and mechanically Doctor Who is really the British Star Trek, featuring the same passion, the same nostalgia, the same conflicting storylines and the same epic fan wanks that characterize American Trek.

The Doctor’s storyline is so epic, so vast and so full of insane low-budget retcons, I never really had much interest in it, until Davies rebooted the series in 2005.

I can’t help but think of this as Doctor Who: The Next Generation, as Davies opened the door to new audiences, while respectfully paying tribute to the old.

And just like the eternal struggle between James Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard, people develop deep attachments to the guy at the helm.

There is a marvelous generational tradition with Doctor Who that American fans have never really been able to experience before. There is a sense of ownership here, as fans claim this actor as my doctor.

Well, I’m proud to say David Tennant was my Doctor. Perhaps the first true international Doctor, as cable TV brought the weekly phenomenon into American homes for the first time.

Tennant captured the energy, the wit and the erratic sparkling genius of The Doctor and embodied, in many ways, the best traits of a generation.

I regret that I never got to see the wise mastermind Doctors of years past. But Tennant gave modern TV audiences what they wanted, and they wanted a Doctor in tennis shoes.

The new Doctor is even younger, but they say his performance has a peculiar ageless quality to it, as if the new Doctor really is an old man wearing a young man’s body. That premise really excites me, so I hope Matt Smith can pull it off.

He had a great five minutes at The End of Time and the his season preview vid looks great. I’ll miss David Tennant of course, but I got a bit tired of the Russell T. Davies Whoverse and I’m hoping Steven Moffat can give us a bit more Highlander and a bit less monster-of-the-week.

The io9 gang has high hopes for him and I think it’s definitely time for some new blood.

But tonight is hats off to Davies and Tennant and a fine start to 2010.

The winner of this year’s Shorty Award for
Advertising did her best work in 1962.

Her name is Peggy Olson, and she is not entirely real.

The “real” Peggy Olson is a character on AMC’s Mad Men, played by Elisabeth Moss.

@peggyolson is a Twitter account run by a fan of the show, one of a group of fans who decided to impersonate characters from Mad Men and post in character on Twitter — a kind of grass-roots promotion that galvanized AMC’s audience and took the Internet by storm.

Unfortunately, not everyone was comfortable with the idea of fans taking on the roles of copyrighted characters. Concerned about liability issues and the protection of their intellectual property, AMC shut the project down, only to recant a few days later, after an ugly fan backlash.

On the show, Peggy Olson is a rising star at Sterling Cooper — an innocent learning to swim with ad-industry sharks, a cautionary tale for women in business, and an unlikely pioneer for women’s rights.

So does a fan pretending to be a fictional character deserve to win an award for advertising?

@peggyolson has never sold an ad, but her Twitter campaign is one of the most innovative promotions ever devised for a TV show.

Mix these things together and you get a figure who can represent the past, present, and future of advertising, all at once.

But who is @peggyolson? Where did the campaign start? Why did she choose Peggy? Where do the fan and the character overlap? And what has she learned from the experience?

Find out Wednesday night after the awards, when I chat live with @peggyolson and her real-life counterpart.

Peggy has agreed to step out from behind the curtain and answer anything we can throw at her.

Send your questions to michael.duff@lubbockonline.com or Twitter them to @michaelduff. Be sure to follow @peggyolson and @michaelduff after the awards so you can see both sides of the interview. Peggy will be switching to another Twitter ID after she reveals her real name.

The award ceremony will start at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Peggy will be joining me after things wrap up, probably after 10 p.m. in New York. That’s 9 p.m. here in Texas.

I’ll be tweeting live about the awards until she arrives.

Looks like the Mad Men Twitter brigade is fighting back. Or maybe they just got tired of incessant interview requests and decided to answer everybody’s questions at once.

Mission statement from We Are Sterling Cooper.com:

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.

And that’s how you spank a giant, clueless corporation. Nice work, guys.

For those who are just tuning in:

First I spent 800 words praising AMC for their innovative marketing campaign. It turns out to be a fan project, and the giant clueless corporation invokes copyright to shut them down.

The characters are back on Twitter now, but I haven’t seen any kind of explanation from the company.