The Biography Channel’s Urban Legends (DISH 119, various times) is the television version of the Internet’s supreme myth-debunking site, snopes.com. Featuring actors to deploy re-enactments as well as to throw viewers off the scent of the truth, Urban Legends takes on just about every ridiculous forwarded email to ever land in your inbox.
While MythBusters prefers a head-on, quasi-scientific approach, the initial aim on Urban Legends is to deceive rather that debunk. Three stories are presented, but only one of them is real. You’ll get your answer in the absolute final seconds of the broadcast, of course, but it’s not all that difficult to tell the difference between the actual amazing cocktail party story and the tall tales which will orbit the Internet so long as we have electrons.
The format randomly places the lone true story, but the giveaway here isn’t order. It’s presentation. While the actors portraying the re-enactments largely do so in pantomime, it’s the fake interviews that tell the story. An elderly woman telling the story of her hockey player brother’s death cannot help but mark the tale with genuine, if carefully controlled, emotion. Affecting such intense personal experience in such a way is a difficult challenge for both writers and actors.
And what does it say about our society, that a show is produced about a woman whose contact lenses supposedly melt to her eyes while in a tanning bed and pet poodles stuck in microwaves is apparently necessary? Urban Legends is a weird cross of a nonfiction show, part reality and part pure script. But if it’ll stop just one insistent “READ THIS NOW!!!! DO NOT DELETE!!!!” forward about needles supposedly stuck in gas pump handles, I’m glad it’s around.
