‘Blizzard’ Leaves a Chilly Feeling

The Weather Channel is not owned by Fox, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was after watching its Storm Week specials. Tonight’s installment, “Blizzard,” might as well be named “When Jack Frost Attacks!”

The show, airing at 9, has all the elements of classic sensationalist TV: amateur video of disasters, eyewitness accounts from survivors and a dramatic soundtrack. At one point, the narrator quite ominously says, “Ice storms--they sometimes create winter wonderlands. But they are one of the most insidious kinds of precipitation.”

Meantime, we learn almost nothing about the weather that results in such destruction and genuine human suffering. In fact, I discovered more about blizzards and ice storms by spending five minutes at the Weather Channel’s Web site (https://www.weather.com) than in an hour watching “Blizzard.”

Take for example the show’s handling of the January 1998 ice storm that crippled the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, causing death and about $4 billion in damage. Is there an explanation as to why this particular storm was so much stronger than others? No. Is there a description of what an ice storm is? Yes, but merely a cursory one.

Instead, we see grainy video of power lines and trees crashing to the ground, punctuated by several “Oh my Gods!” Five minutes later, we see it again; somehow it seems as if all the video clips are on a continuous loop.

Then we get bogged down in the minutiae of how a family of dairy farmers, the Ashlines, coped. Marlene Ashline reports: “I had no power to do any cooking, so I had my barbecue grill outside. Only half of the food got cooked because the fuel ran out. So I had half-cooked food, and we ended up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

And so the show goes, on and on: vignettes of a skater and fishermen being pulled from lakes after misjudging the ice’s thickness. A boat capsizing in stormy seas. A sequence that begins with the story of frostbitten hikers rescued from Mt. Baldy and manages to segue to the annual New Year’s Day swimming activities of a “polar bear” club in Wisconsin.

As with the rest of Storm Week, which will conclude Thursday at 9 p.m. with “World’s Worst Weather,” this approach tends to trivialize the life-and-death power that weather can wield. Could this be one of the most insidious kinds of programming?