TV REVIEWS : Going With the Flow of ‘Colorado River’

Even narrator-host James Taylor playing his drippingly sincere songs by the banks of the Colorado doesn’t stop us from getting into the flow of TBS’ “Colorado River Adventure,” which is really eight parts river and one part adventure.

Taylor takes his teen-age son, Ben, and joins 13 others for a three-week ride in handmade dories down the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon and ending at the headwaters of Lake Mead. They’re constrained by dams to the south (Hoover) and the east (Glen Canyon), and if team leader and master dory boatsman Martin Litton loves the river, he hates the dams.

Writer-producers William A. Anderson and Alice Arlen seduce us with the river-raft trip, but the real goal of “Colorado River Adventure” is to explain why this huge, charging, seemingly indomitable carver of the world’s greatest canyon is under threat.

Between bouts of bobbing up and down rapids, Litton sits quietly with Taylor and argues that the daily raising and lowering of water levels at Glen Canyon Dam (done according to electrical power demand) has steadily despoiled the downstream Colorado and eroded its banks--right through the Grand Canyon.

Litton’s got a friend here, but it’s not so much Taylor as it is cinematographer Wolfgang Bayer, who captures the canyon’s rust-red glow and the river’s sudsy, churning torrents, which nearly get the better of boatsman Litton at the toughest rapids, Lava Falls.

The passive armchair potato may be glad not to be there, but the animating idea of this hour is of wilderness’s essential uselessness--its existence above and apart from human productivity, its final value as a thing unto itself. The Grand Canyon is that, and so is the river that made it.

* “Colorado River Adventure” airs at 5:05 p.m. and again at 8:05 p.m. today on TBS.