EARTH LIVE
National Geographic, 8:00 p.m. ET
Live TV specials on a grand scale are like competing at the Olympics: You work for a long, long time to get one shot at glory, with only so many elements under your control. When it works, you get the Beatles unveiling “All You Need Is Love” to a global TV audience. When it doesn’t, you get Geraldo Rivera giving a sheepish shrug in front of an empty Al Capone “vault.” Tonight, for two hours, National Geographic goes to various places around the world, where its top nature photographers are poised, in the wild and in more urban locations, to, they hope, capture animals in action across the globe, live. It’s a bold experiment – but what can we really expect to see? Carnage? Courtship? Maybe. But, just as likely, there will be more than a little dozing, scratching, and urinating. To be fair, though, that’s pretty much what Earth Live would be likely to get if it trained its cameras at my natural habitat as well…