Re: Instructional Shows/Junkyard Wars (was Re: Does D & D...

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Obviously I'm going to have to check out Good Eats - it sounds like something right up my alley.  So far, my only Food Network outings have been Two Fat Ladies, Door Knock Dinners, and Iron Chef (which I call my favorite "surreality show.")

To get back to list topic:

>The writing is great, but also the presentation: they 
>verbally explain concepts AND reinforce them visually 
>with captions, diagrams, gestures, models... 

In other words, it's a televised user's manual.  I think our kind of work seems to be moving from its geek roots to the cutting edge of cool - there seems to be a rise in this kind of "user manual TV."  Look at the kind of shows that are cropping up in specialty markets:

- Good Eats, which apparently tells you *everything* you need to know about a certain food, from history to preparation.

- Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge (are both of these shows running concurrently? I noticed that the new season of Junkyard once again has the British host/teams and that the banner in the ads for the whitewater rafts said "Scrapheap Challenge" - a banner that was greyed out in the final episode!  But I digress.)  

If you watch, you not only see a bunch of people running around trash-talking each other while they build improbable machines out of trash, you also get wonderfully silly line illustrations that, well, illustrate the final machine, the physical principles involved, and the possible points of failure.  I've learned a fair amount of engineering while watching that show, enough to be proud of myself for catching a design flaw in one of the snowmobiles before the makers did.

There's even a "user manual" argument to be made for one of my former guilty pleasures - "Wishbone."  This children's show had the world's cutest Jack Russell terrier acting out roles from great books - but interspersed with scenes from the lives of his underage owners facing modern versions of the same problems described in the books, and with a little side commentary on the author of the original book.  Although packaged as sheer entertainment, there was a lot of educating going on - "There was a book, this is who wrote it, this is why you should care about what happened in it."

In each case, the show is covering the same points as a good manual - what it is, how it works, how it relates to you, possible trouble points.

This is cool stuff. I think we ought to be encourging it as much as possible - preferably from within the ranks of writers on the shows... :>

Linnea Dodson

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