Plug for River Monsters - Animal Planet you owe us one

And now for an unpaid endorsement of Animal Planet's show River Monsters.

We like the premise. An eccentric biologist (at least he wants us to think he's a biologist) / extreme angler (we think that means crazed fisherman) travels to remote areas of the world to track down underwater urban legends. We're talking the King Kongs of the Amazon. Or India. Or Taiwan. Or wherever he happens to be.

Donned in his flip flops, linen shirts, and manning unusually nice "fishing" gear (you know, the kind you walk into Bass Pro Shop to get when you tell the sales clerk you're looking to reel in your garden variety manta ray this weekend), Jeremy Wade braves Deliverance-type environments that make you just want to scream with fear of catching seven different kinds of diseases.

Wade first scouts out a "deadly" species of freshwater fish, generally it's one that grows to significant proportions and has had a rap for terrorizing non-scaled humans. He then gives a background of the most gruesome stories and promptly hops on his boat to hunt down the "monster. This is where the show kind of breaks down for us.

Many of the species showcased on the series are indeed large, scary-looking critters. And some of them are surprising - you never think a catfish can grow big enough to eat a small child, but hey...people in the Amazon sometimes get careless with daycare. What we don't like is the sensationalistic approach of demonizing a species, witch-hunting it down, and then catching/wrestling/marveling at it like Steve Irwin.

We especially don't like Wade actually yanking the subjects out of the water, suspending it on his boat and then chit-chatting about it while the poor animal gasps for breath. Case in point - the piraiba. Upon dragging it out of the river, Wade discusses the noises that catfish is producing - awful gulping/croaking sounds indicating its need for oxygen. You fool!

What we do like about the show is it showcasing how little we still know about our waters, even fresh. We think so rarely about the aquatic life that thrives in any body of water, and how certain species are learning to adapt between fresh and salt. It's also fun to see fish with teeth, fish without teeth, and species that we had no idea would even think of going upstream. We'd far prefer for Wade to discuss the aspects of what makes these river species so large, so rare, or so mysterious. There is very little biological history, process, or discussion added into these episodes. Rather it's generally edited to be man vs. beast with man usually winning for no clear reason.

If only AP would drop the whole angler-angle we'd be far happier campers.