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.”
Honestly, it kind of hurts when “Bill Nye the Science Guy” reprimands you. What happened to the warm, avuncular Disney channel presenter doing zany experiments in a bowtie? Do you know that your skin weighs twice as much as your brain does? Nye taught me that back in the mid-Nineties, when I was young and my mind seemed to have endless space to hold useless facts. And did you know that a TV sinks if you throw it in a pool? Well, I’ve seen it with my own eyes thanks to Nye.
Alas, it seems that climate change will leave nothing – not even my nostalgic kids TV memories – untouched. Because on The End is Nye, Bill Nye ditches his science-geek schtick in favour of really, really tough love. You might think the best way to convince viewers to stop killing the planet would be to show them beautiful images of Earth bursting with life. But Nye is less like David Attenborough here and more like Jacob Marley wearing a crisp white lab coat instead of chains. The guy who once implored children to see the wonder in the natural world has reinvented himself as, in his words, a “tour guide to the end”. It’s A Christmas Carol for the planet.
Across six episodes, Nye leads viewers through devastating simulations of the worst catastrophes imaginable: earthquakes, tsunamis, dust storms, droughts and hurricanes. There’s even something called a supervolcano. Like Mrs Trunchbull forcing Bruce to eat an entire chocolate cake when he only stole a slice in Matilda, Nye wants us to take all our bad choices – chiefly, the burning of fossil fuels – to the extreme conclusion. If we’re a “weird death cult”, then Nye is our visionary leader, seducing us into a new way of life.
Of course, the utopia he has in mind is not a commune on Kauai – my cultish fantasies always end in Hawaii. Nye wants us to install solar panels and buy electric cars and build wind farms. Basically, he would like us to listen to scientists like him. It’s essentially what he’s always wanted from his earliest incarnations. On Bill Nye the Science Guy, which aired from 1993 to 1999, he hoped science was cool enough in and of itself to get our attention. In 2017, he returned to TV screens via the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World, in which he hoped science would get a signal boost from celebrities. Tyler the Creator wrote the theme song. Karlie Kloss was a correspondent.
But Nye, it seems, has had enough – enough of elected officials trying to politicise the end of the world and enough of the human negligence that makes disasters worse. He comes to us this time as the bad cop of our apocalyptic nightmares. There will be no more carrots, no more celebrities (unless you count cameos from series executive producer Seth MacFarlane, which I don’t think we do). Nye is kind of mean now, but it’s not his fault. This is just what happens when you push Science Dad to his limit.
The End is Nye is on Peacock
