The new History Channel series debuting tonight at 10 p.m. — “Chasing Mummies” — falls into many of the same traps as the other reality TV shows.
A lot of the drama on view in the first two episodes feels cooked up — especially the big crisis on tonight’s show which involves an annoyingly naive archeological intern named Zoe (and a cameraman) being “accidentally” locked into a pyramid and forgotten about for several hours.
It was also a big mistake to feature the show’s executive producer Leslie Greif (below, right) as one of the characters on the series — he is just about the worst reality show “actor” to come along since Bam Margera’s parents.
Greif is such a blustering self-dramatizer that you just wish he would go away. He hypes everything around him, so we quickly stop taking him seriously. His hysteria in episode one about the lost intern feels completely phony so we know the girl can’t be in real trouble.
What saves the show — and indeed makes it an above average example of the genre — are the Egyptian settings and the star figure, Dr. Zahi Hawass (above), who is a major scholar and popular writer in the field of Egyptology.
“Chasing Mummies” takes us to a place that most of us are unlikely to visit on our own and it offers us a great guide (and protagonist) who really knows what he’s talking about.
Hawass is a bit of a hambone — more than a tad full of himself — but he has a good reason to be egotistical.
The beauty of Cairo and the outlying archeological sites are a wonderful change from reality shows set in some suburban nowhere or cities we are already familiar with (I think one of the reasons “Jersey Shore” caught on was the freshness of the Seaside Heights location).
Ironically, the exotic Egyptian settings point up the artifice of the manufactured drama. When the coy and narcissistic Zoe arrives in her first scene — fully miked and with multiple cameras recording her entrance — we don’t believe what we are hearing about the archeological crew expecting the arrival of a different student with a different name.
And when her supervisor carelessly leaves the girl behind deep inside a pyramid — with a cameraman, of course — the whole story about her being accidentally “trapped” becomes as phony as a three-dollar bill.
The show is well worth watching but it’s a shame Leslie Greif and his minions felt they had to cheese things up in order to attract an audience.
Dr. Hawass and his work — and the Egyptian history and culture — are certainly interesting enough to support a History Channel series on their own.
