Sometimes a TV series’ premise is hard to puzzle out. In its first episodes, “Survivor” seemed to be about a bunch of people in bathing suits collaborating to battle a hostile environment. Slow viewers only gradually realized that it was about treachery and deceit.
Nat Geo Wild’s new show “Wild Nights With Mireya Mayor” is a documentary series about wildlife in urban areas, but its approach to what should be an interesting topic is distracting without being diverting. The facts that emerge through the clutter probably aren’t enough to justify an hour of viewers’ time.
In the premiere, airing tonight at 9 p.m., Dr. Mireya Mayor, a primatologist who has appeared in shows on National Geographic and the History Channel, spends a night searching for wild animals that live in and around New Orleans. By the way, if all the dark footage that appears in this episode was actually shot in one night, this camera crew is the most efficient in TV history.
The premiere abandons the nocturnal premise midway and shows some footage about an invasive species of termite that was shot during the day. And at the end, Mayor supposedly gets up early in the morning to climb a radio tower that’s been colonized by parakeets.
The show can’t decide whether to treat Mayor as an expert or, as the title and the location hint, a bit of a sex symbol. She comes across as not much of either. She gets the predictable response when she asks revelers in the French Quarter where to find wildlife at night, and at one point someone suggests she try to get Mardi Gras beads, which usually require some form of indecent exposure. Apropos of nothing, she mentions that she used to be a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins.
But throughout the show she wears a wool cap and drab clothes that just beg us to take her seriously. Unfortunately, the few insights she delivers to the camera aren’t that interesting. For example, most of us could probably figure out ourselves that cockroaches in a tomb help with the decomposition process.
A through line in the episode is Mayor’s attempt to see a feral hog. She spends time with a trapper near the airport, then joins a group of government hunters in a city park, and finally meets up again with the trapper in an expensive residential neighborhood.
Mayor tries to build some suspense about whether the trapper will call her back, but viewers will not be on the edge of their seats. The hunting sequence in the park falls flat because the cameramen simply focus on the waiting men. The dogs that are doing the actual hunting are off camera.
In one odd sequence, Mayor seems to be breaking into a cemetery, then an onscreen graphic says she actually got permission. The producers score points for honesty, but this seriously undercuts the drama when it looks as if she might get arrested.
Mayor seems to want to appear not to be trying too hard, which gives her a certain nonchalant appeal. When she ventures a witticism — at one point, she calls the boar trapper’s vehicle a “pig-up truck” — her reticence seems like a good idea.
Viewers might crack a smile over some of her interactions with the foreign-born cabbie she hired for the night, and a sequence in which she eats some swamp delicacies with bayou residents raises the energy level.
A pun is always tempting, but this show might have been better off if it hadn’t promised us a wild night and had settled for a title like “Moderately Interesting Investigations of Chiefly Nocturnal Wildlife With Mireya Mayor.”
