Think the contestants on “Survivor” have it tough? At least they get tossed a few necessities and have opportunities to enjoy tasty foods by winning challenges. Oh, and a shot at a $1 million grand prize.

The folks on Sunday’s episode of Discovery’s “Curiosity” have to do a bit more than outwit, outplay and outlast. They have to actually survive … as cavemen. That means no pots and pans, no rice, no tarps, and no pizza and beer for rewards. Instead, nine people leave behind the modern world and (try to) live in the wilderness of Motherwell Ranch in Colorado for 10 days. Their only supplies? Paleolithic clothing, rope, unknapped stone, enough water for 48 hours, one shelter big enough for four, their wits and “Super Size Me’s” Morgan Spurlock as their leader.

And it does not look like fun. Five days into the experiment, entitled “I, Caveman,” the group’s nerves are shot, people look miserable and they’re more than a bit snippy.

“Communicating through online websites, it makes it easier to deal with people. I mean, I don’t know how cavemen got along back then,” Amy, a designer, told Discovery’s cameras. “When you’re in each other’s faces like this, I mean, you can kind of drive people a little crazy.”

The two-part special “I, Caveman” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Discovery.

Episode 1

Were we better off as cavemen? High in the mountains of northern Colorado, the group struggles for survival while four experts assess their progress and offer insights about what modern people can learn from the ancient world. In the first of two episodes, the experience takes a heavy toll on the group as extreme cold, dehydration, and hunger threaten to bring an early end to the experiment.

Episode 2

In the second of two parts, the group struggles to find food and relocates their camp to a location closer to big game, betting their survival on a successful hunt. The experts observing them believe that to be a risky strategy. Extreme hunger and deprivation causes tensions to flare. Some of the group buckle under the pressure, leaving the experiment on the brink of failure. Could a successful hunt save them?

September 13th 2011

There have been plenty of TV shows about cops, prisons and drug addicts, but there’s never been a show that gives you a real-time look at criminals at work — until now.

“American Underworld,” which debuts Monday on Discovery, is an extended, firsthand look at illegal activities. The cameras follow a coke dealer, a meth maker, a car-theft ring and a pimp, among others.

It’s a first for a major network; they usually stay away from deliberately going out and recording crimes, for fear they could be prosecuted as accessories.

In the first episode, the show’s creator, Mark Allen Johnson, interviews a coke kingpin in Los Angeles, visits the house where an illegal steroid maker whips up his drugs and watches a girl engage in the dangerous “shake ’n’ bake” method of making crystal meth.

When filming a show like this, they had to take precautions, including obscuring locations, blurring out faces and changing voices, says executive producer Lisa Andreae.

To protect the parties involved, Andreae says, the production company went through endless meetings with lawyers to make sure that they were not breaking any laws.

“It was a pretty tricky process,” Andreae says. “We had a lot of legal advice before we went out and shot anything and certainly spoke to criminal lawyers and Discovery lawyers and production [company] lawyers to make sure we weren’t crossing any lines.”

Mostly, it meant that Johnson was merely a camera-toting fly on the wall.

“He’s there documenting it, while not getting involved in any way,” says Andraea.

Most times, Johnson didn’t know where he was going in advance, didn’t touch anything illegal and didn’t take any hidden-camera footage. He also had to make sure that he didn’t say anything that would make it seem as if he was encouraging illicit activity.

Greenlighting a show like this has surprised other TV producers.

“All I can guess, in terms of the law, is that the real-world risk isn’t big enough to worry about,” says David Page of David Page Productions.

Adds 44 Blue’s Rasha Drachkovitch, “We used to joke the three Ps — prisons, prostitutes and police — are good for ratings because they’re so edgy, but this is taking it to the next level.”

September 12th 2011

Discovery’s investigative show “American Underworld,” hosted and mostly photographed by Newsweek and New York Times photojournalist Mark Allen Johnson premieres Monday, Sept. 19, at 10 p.m. Hourlong is exec produced by Lisa Andreae for her shingle the Incubator, with Cameo Wallace producing for Discovery.

The cabler has set an initial run of three “Underworld” segs. The first features Johnson’s in-person interviews with meth cooks in rural Tennessee and homemade steroid producer-suppliers. The second focuses on car theft in Northern California, while the third examines the sex trade in Chicago.

Johnson said that he is glad to have finally found a network willing to supply the legal framework necessary to support the project; other nets balked at the thorny issues raised by Johnson’s contacts.

The series, Johnson said, takes time to produce, and sometimes promising projects don’t always pan out, alluding to a potential story about “these guys who were selling fully automatic rifles with laser sights, everything, on the streets of Manhattan.”

Using unorthodox methods, Johnson uses a mix of brains and bravado to gain access to highly secretive worlds.  Securing the trust of his subjects alone can be a deadly business, often requiring months of negotiations.  Pointing a video camera at them truly puts his life at risk.  Entering these worlds – sometimes blindfolded and separated from his crew – Johnson brings back some of the most raw and compelling footage on television.

Episode 1: Drugs
Premieres Monday, September 19th at 10PM ET/PT

Homemade drug manufacturing is a big business, and one that is taking place in kitchens across America.  Johnson shows firsthand how drugs are made, distributed and used, from one of the largest crack cocaine business in Los Angeles to a highly toxic – and rarely seen –  “shake ‘n’ bake” meth production process in rural Tennessee.  After extensive negotiations, Johnson also gains the trust of a major homemade steroid producer and supplier who cooks up performance-enhancing drugs from raw ingredients sent from secret foreign suppliers.  He tests them on himself before distributing them to people in gyms and homes across America.

Episode 2: Theft
Premieres Monday, September 26th at 10PM ET/PT

Every 40 seconds, a car is stolen in America.  Specialized car thieves are constantly “shopping” for cars – your cars – that meet their customers’ specifications.   Johnson gains unprecedented access to a car theft ring and follows a thief who identifies a truck he needs, parked right in front of the owner’s house in a typical suburban neighborhood.  He disarms the alarm system, drives it back to a secret “chop shop” where a gang is ready to strip and rebuild it (complete with new VIN number) , then resells it for a $7,000 profit – all in less than 24 hours.  Johnson also spends 48 hours with a veteran identity thief who shows just how vulnerable we are when his accomplice, a waitress, “skims” customers’ credit card information onto a hard drive to be used later to make easy money.

Episode 3: Sex Trade
Premieres Monday, October 3rd at 10PM ET/PT

The sex trade is a multi-billion dollar business, but working girls vary from streetwalkers controlled by outlandish pimps to highly sophisticated escorts charging thousands of dollars an hour.  Johnson investigates the world of pimps, from Chicago– the birthplace of the American street pimp– to our nation’s capital where a pimp named Good Game sends his number one prostitute out to work the streets 24/7.  But Mark doesn’t stop there. He gains access to girls working the sex trade with unparalleled intimacy.  One girl has ditched the traditional pimp in favor of the Internet, making a six-figure income from high-class liaisons in five star hotels.  And in Texas, Mark meets a man who has three girls living with him, working as strippers to support a lavish suburban lifestyle.

Channel 4 has made so many bad programmes about sex over the years (who remembers ‘Designer Vaginas’ and ‘The World’s Biggest Penis’?) that few viewers can have approached last night’s The Sex Researchers with anything but trepidation.

And in some ways – a surfeit of gratuitously naked bodies; Monty Pythonesque graphics – it was exactly as you’d expect. As a piece of history, however, it worked very well, providing interesting facts and fascinating perspective in equal measure.

Did you know, for example, that cornflakes were invented by WK Kellogg because he thought that a dry, bland breakfast in the morning would dampen people’s sexual desire? It makes you wonder what the snap, crackle and pop of Rice Krispies is supposed to do. Kellogg was one of many people throughout history who were obsessed with female sexual desire, essentially believing that there was no such thing and that any manifestation of such pleasure must be a sign of illness. Until very recently, this was a more widespread view than you might think, rooted in Christian belief rather then science, and last night’s programme made a very good case that throughout history sex research, by conducting investigations and uncovering facts, acted as a kind of scientific counterweight to the prevailing morality of the day.

A man called Tiresias from Greek mythology is regarded as the first sex researcher after living for seven years as a woman. He was later struck dumb by Hera, the wife of Zeus because of his belief that women took more pleasure from sex. Even in those days, such an opinion got a bad press. Like Hera, David Norris’s friend Plato had very definite views on female sexual desire. It didn’t really exist, as far as he was concerned. In later years, such desire was write off as witchcraft, and later as hysteria. The vibrator was invented as a medical device, to cure women who displayed signs of sexual pleasure, and in the early years of the last century, conservative women’s magazines like Home Needle Generator were full of ads for such gadgets. It was only when they came to be seen as a means to sexual pleasure in themselves that they migrated to sex shops, the back counters of Ann Summers’ stores and to the internet.

Sexual research continues up to the present day, and seems currently obsessed with what woman want, and what brings them the sexual pleasure they were denied for so long. According to one experiment, a vigorous 20 minute workout before intercourse greatly increases a woman’s enjoyment, assuming she has any energy left, of course. Another investigation of “the plasticity of female sexuality” showed the same two images – of a naked male and a naked female – to a heterosexual man and woman, whose eye movements were monitored to determine precisely where they looked.

The man’s eyes barely left the female’s body (and occasionally her face) while the woman’s eyes spent as much time looking at the female as at the man. Was this a sign that she was “checking out the competition”, The Sex Researchers asked, or was it a sign that she is more open to new sexual experiences then men? There’s no answer to that one yet, apparently. There are some things even sex research can’t find out.

The past, in the end, is an innocent place. How serious its convictions are- and how comically naive, mere generations later, they are revealed to be. Look at the past, poor thing, with its flat Earth, its leech cures, its witch-finder generals. What can one do but shake one’s head at its bumpkin ignorance, and congratulate oneself on having had the wisdom to be born in a spotlessly enlightened time like the present? I wonder what, in turn, people of the future will think when they look back at us, and at our behaviour and beliefs. I expect they’ll think something like, “Yes, human beings used to be pretty silly – but once they reached the early 21st century, they’d got everything worked out. Well done, inhabitants of the early 21st century!”

Such was the self-satisfaction that washed over me as I enjoyed THE SEX RESEARCHERS (Channel 4), the first episode of a documentary series reminding us how hopeless previous generations were about sex, compared with today, when we all know everything and are sexually fulfilled.

Wrongness about sex, we leart, goes back at least as far as Plato. He described female malady called “womb fury”, in which the uterus would depart from its customary position and float off around the body, eventually reaching the windpipe and throttling its host from the inside. Happily the ancient Greeks were able to remedy this by placing the patient on a perfumed cushion while pushing the dung of a mule up her nostrils. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, and I would imagine the producers of THE SEX RESEARCHERS thought so to, because they illustrated it with an animation much in the style of Terry Gilliams’s, with a diagram of a uterus crawling across a woman’s torso like a mischevious spider.

Most historical attitudes towards sex seem to have been shaped by mystification about the female. Lust in women was taken as a sign of madness. In 19th-century France, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot decised a special method of demonstrating the instability of the female mind. Before an audience of fellow scientists, among them Freud, he proved that by touching an attractive young female assistant in certain areas he could “induce a spectacular response” – the show-off – which could only, he declared, “be interpreted as a form of mental breakdown.”

In Victorian England, by contrast, some experts believed that genital manipulation was not the cause of female lunacy but a potential cure. Concerned husbands would pay doctors to alleviate their wives’ hysteria by provivding what I suppose a family newspaper can describe only as an intimate massage. “The treatment proved immensely popular,” said the voice-over, “and increasing numbers of woman began to report symptoms.”

By the time we reached the story of the 18th-century scientist whose research into reproduction involved dressing male frogs in trousers, I began to suspect I was suffereing from hysteria myself, although I should add that I did not choose the Victorian method of relieving it.

From time to time we leart about more recent studies. One of these concluded that women are aroused by a wider range of stimuli than men are, and are thus “less focused owhen it comes to their sexuality,” which sounds like a polite way of saying they’re easy. These scientists want to be careful. Slut Walks have been organised over less.

Almost everything in the programme made me want to snigger, which I realise is pathetically British. But it wasn’t sex itself that I found amusing, so much as the earnestness with which experts have investigated it. My favourite expert was William H Masters, an American who, in the Sixties, suggested to his pretty female colleague Virginia Johnson that “as part of their research” they should have sex with each other. She agreed, so they did, conducting their experiment at his house, although only after he’d sent his wife and children off on a nice long holiday.

I have always maintained that television is more entertaining than the cinema and last night handed me yet more proof. Back in 2004 Liam Neeson starred on the big screen as Alfred Kinsey, and American biologist who battled prudery and prejudice to publish a groundbreaking report on human sexual behaviour.

Interesting subject but not the world’s most interesting film. A more gripping take was recounted in THE SEX RESEARCHERS (C4) of Masters and Johnson, whose own careers had all the elements for a Hollywood smash.

Sex research went back a lot further then this pair, perhaps as far as a 17th-century Italian priest called Spallanzani who made miniature trousers for male frogs to stop them getting lady frogs in the tadpole way.

In the 19th century a Parisian doctor by the name of Charcot demonstrated quirks of human biology using attractive female models in lecture halls packed out with curious male doctors.

However, sex research really took off in Fifties America. While that time and place is associated with strait-laced attitudes and political witchhunts a few scientists were thinking and doing the unthinkable.

At the University of Washington in Missouri gynaecologist Bill Masters asked his secretary Virginia Johnson to find him female subjects for his investigations. Under conditions of immense secrecy the volunteers who came forward made love in a laboratory while their vital signs were measured.

The secrecy and perhaps nature of the work meant it wasn’t long before Johnson and the married Masters started doing their own research together after hours.

When the authorities wised up to what was going in, the pair set up their own research facility funded partly by a perfume company hoping the secret of human sex scents might be revealed.

Tired of being the eternal mistress, Johnson began an an affair with a businessman. Fearing for the future of the Masters and Johnson brand Masters divorced his wife and persuaded Johnson to marry him. Which perhaps proves that you can know a great deal about sex but still not understand love.

All this made me recall an episode of the Twilight Zone in which an unhappy gambler was suddenly given the ability to win at everything. As a result he began to feel less and less satisfied every time he hit the jackpot, proving I suppose that the losses in an ordinary life are what make the wins worthwhile.

June 6th 2010

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Actor Morgan Freeman didn’t shy away from tough questions for his new Science Channel series about space exploration. On Wednesday’s first episode he asks, “Was there a Creator?”

The question, as with most of the topics he discusses on the eight-episode series, is more likely to lead to more questions than it is to answers.

“What we’re learning is we don’t know a lot more than we do know,” said Freeman, whose lifelong fascination with astronomy and space travel coincided with the Science Channel’s effort to attract more attention to itself with the help of celebrities who bring a passion to their hobbies.

The Academy Award winner hosts and narrates the series, “Through the Wormhole,” and it was made by his production company.

Scientists are tapped to address issues like what happened before the creation of the universe, what dark matter is doing to the galaxies, whether time travel will someday be possible, what intelligent life might exist beyond Earth and how life began on Earth.

The idea of a God that created the universe is hard for many scientists to deal with, but one that some turn to when not everything they see is explained by the complex mathematical equations used to prove theories.

“It is hard for me to get my mind wrapped around the idea that there is an extra, corporal — shall we say, intelligence — that controls everything,” Freeman said.

Freeman is intrigued by the speed of light and how and why light travels. The idea of time travel is another interest, although the actor isn’t sure whether he’d like to go backward or forward.

Similarly, he’d love to travel in space someday. But he doesn’t want to just go for a ride.

“I’d like to have a destination,” he said, “and I’d like that destination being a foreign land where there are things we could possibly communicate with. Just wandering around out there — you might as well be out in the ocean trying to swim.”

The issues discussed in “Through the Wormhole” are “heady stuff,” but they’re presented in an entertaining way, said Debbie Myers, the network’s general manager. That’s one of Myers’ chief goals, to break through the stuffy and dry reputation of science programming.

Whoopi Goldberg is doing a science-related game for the network that is due this fall. Will Smith is also hoping to boost the network’s “Young Scientist Challenge.”

Freeman, who won an Oscar in 2004 for “Million Dollar Baby,” brought a common touch to the complex stories on his series, Myers said.

“Morgan is kind of the everyman,” she said. “He has a love for science, but he’s not a scientist, and he’s a great storyteller.”

July 4th 2010

This science Channel series sort of had us at hello with a title that geeky, but add the deity-friendly voice of host Freeman asking unanswerable questions about the universe and we’re hooked. Granted, we can barely understand some of the quantum mechanics and theoretical physics being tossed around, but it’s a delight to watch science programming on cable that doesn’t involve Bigfoot.