With last night's bird-flu-disaster movie "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" ABC has done the impossible: they've made the apocalypse boring. I'm serious: watching it was like eating a banana split with Ambien sprinkles: I could barely keep my head up halfway through. And not only that, but the writers and producers missed a real opportunity to add a little zing to the plot with a news/cable news subplot. Can you imagine what the news coverage would really be like in the case of, God forbid, a devastating bird flu epidemic in this country? Every aspiring Anderson Cooper would be making their own bird-flu versions of "The Blair Witch Project" with their personal camcorders out in the flu-ridden field, including documenting every spike in their own fevers. Anchors would be at their studio desks talking through personal respirators, if not full-on hazmat suits. There would be screaming, crying, and full-on "Lord of the Flies" turf warfare, and that would just be one interview CNN prez Jon Klein would give to Jacques Steinberg at the New York Times.
Instead, "Fatal Contact" was just stippled with short clips of vacant-looking anchors on a fictional news channel cheerfully updating the death toll. What ABC failed to realize is that, all kidding aside, a bird flu epidemic wouldn't be so much a health story as it would be a war for survival, and the news anchors covering it would become, through immediate battlefield promotions, war correspondents.
If anybody wants to make a really scary movie about bird flu, they should write the script from the POV of news executives. Now that would be thrilling, and terrifying, in a way that might actually do some good, public-readiness-wise.
