Can 'The Colony' mimick a post-apocalyptic world?

For some reason human beings are a little bit obsessed with the end of the world. There are plenty of books about it from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" - which I haven't gotten around to reading yet - to Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents." Movies about it abound, too, including the upcoming "2012," based on the Mayan belief that the world will end in that year.

So I guess it was just a matter of time before someone got around to making a reality TV show about the end of the world. How is that possible, you might ask? Well, they got a bunch of people and set them up in a situation based on what the show creators think the end of the world might look like. Basically, it's set up in a skid-row warehouse district in Los Angles. For anyone whose seen this part of the city, it doesn't take much imagination to picture it as it will look after some kind of apocalypse since it kinda looks like that already.

I've only seen a couple episodes of Discovery Channel's "The Colony," but I wonder how real the actions of the people involved in the project really are. The people involved come from a variety of backgrounds - engineers, nurses, a machinist. There are no journalists so I guess my skill set won't be useful in forming an alliance after the world ends.

On the episodes that I've seen, the colonists create a running shower with water from the Los Angeles River - a river that I have never known to contain water, but maybe after the world ends it will revert back to a riparian habitat - and they make a washing machine. They neglect to properly secure their compound. Some hooligans get in and steal their food. They do, however, realize the need for a renewable source of energy and they scavenge for solar panels to create their own power source.

Somehow I think if there were really a global catastrophe of some sort, clean clothes might be the least of the worries. It will be interesting to see how the ten weeks play out. New episodes air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.