We’ve long been obsessed with disaster. On his new show The End Is Nye, beloved TV scientist and America’s father figure Bill Nye points to the storms of The Tempest, but even Shakespeare caught the catastrophe bug earlier than that. Twelfth Night opens with a shipwreck. In her menacing extreme weather speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania speaks of tremendous floods, rotting crops, and disappearing seasons. Now, we have 24-hour news channels that thrive on disaster porn.
Nye appeals to our attraction to calamity, even as he balks at it. “Think about it, people,” he declares on his debut Peacock series about the varied forms – from solar flares to careening comets – Armageddon might take. His eyes are wide, and his voice wobbles with opprobrium. “We’re like some kind of weird death cult.”
