This disaster of a TV miniseries deserves a category all its own

NO disaster, large or small, escapes the watchful eyes of those who produce movies and miniseries. And although a little late for the hurricane season, here comes CBS’ “Category 7: The End of the World,” the greatest disaster of them all.

This follows on the weary heels of “Category 6: Day of Destruction,” also on CBS, and no doubt heralds the prequel, “Category 1: The Garden of Eden,” a story in which two people of opposite sexes take a peek at what makes them opposite and get booted out of Paradise.

For reasons that even now I can’t explain, I watched the first part of “7,” joining with its vast audience of those who consider “The Simpsons” a reality show, and I was transfixed by the awfulness of it.

I managed to avoid “6” by leaving the house at the appropriate time, but I was somehow drawn to the notion of a miniseries devoted to the end of the world, the Apocalypse being so close at hand. So I put aside a collection of words enclosed in a package called a book and settled down to be horrified.

The book, by the way, was “The Grizzly Maze” by Nick Jans, the story of Malibu’s Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend who, while trying to be kindly to them, were eaten by grizzly bears or, as the author explains in the stern manner of a fifth-grade teacher, brown bears. Big things with teeth and claws.

One can easily determine by my reading habits (My last book was about killer sharks, “The Devil’s Teeth” by Susan Casey) how I tilt toward the bizarre, somewhat explaining why I decided to watch “7.” Also intriguing me was the question of where the networks would go for chaos entertainment after the end of the world. The end of the universe? The end of space? One can only guess.

For those who missed it, the latest TV disaster miniseries -- which ends Sunday -- is based on hurricanes, accompanied by tornadoes, that sweep not just the Gulf Coast, but the whole world, beginning with Paris, which seems only right, given France’s refusal to help us conquer, I mean liberate, Iraq.

Having worked as a television writer for 20 years, I have some idea of how a project like “7” might have come about. It usually begins not with an idea but with the desperation to come up with an idea. A small group of desperate people gathers in a room and “brainstorms,” which, in its way, is a disaster of the frontal lobes.

I experienced this once while writing an episode for an old TV series called “Jake and the Fat Man” at a time when I needed money more than I needed honor. To come up with an idea for the episode, we sat in a semicircle in a dimly lighted room at Universal Studios and, well, pondered. It had the mood of a seance. One expected at any moment to hear the eerie tapping of a dead executive producer, which did not occur, but only because we failed to join hands. How we finally came up with the program’s theme escapes me, but I’m sure I had very little to do with it.

The gathering of idea people in “7” no doubt included more special effects experts than creative thinkers, since visual chaos, not acting, is the main element of the drama. I must mention, by the way, that this took place long before the real disasters that shattered the Gulf Coast. Its timing is just a fortunate coincidence.

After they all agreed on the concept for a global hurricane, they were busy congratulating one another when someone wondered, “Are we going to need a writer for this?” The question was followed by a long period of silence until one of them replied, “Someone’s got to type it up.” They all agreed that the work was probably too much for a secretary so they’d find writers when they were ready to tell them what to do.

The result was what we saw last Sunday, a formulaic melange starring special effects and featuring sex, marital torment, lost love, terrorism, heroism, nepotism and the efforts of a tough but soft female FEMA director to stop the storm. Not likely.

I am drawn, as I indicated earlier, to disaster movies, from “Asteroid” to “War of the Worlds,” including even Steven Spielberg’s silly remake of the latter, a classic that should never have been tampered with even by Hollywood’s Mr. God.

There is something in the human spirit that dreams of being smashed, burned, struck by lightning, buried alive, drowned, possessed by demons, eaten by monsters, boiled by lava or otherwise dispatched by a veritable feast of occurrences, any one of which could boil our blood or turn our brains into Cream of Wheat.

That may be the very aim of television by presenting terrible things like “Category 7: The End of the World.” They, the desperate ones, by liquefying the brains of those not already mushed, are setting us up for future disaster movies and miniseries, all of which we’ll watch and help make a lot of money for the studios because we will have become zombie-brained.

I have a better idea. We’ll call it “Category 10: The End of Television Crap,” and turn off all of our TV sets. Cheers. Happiness. Freeze frame and fade out.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com unless he has been melted by the sun or frozen by a new Ice Age.