Respect Authority

So last night, in a fit of boredom, I decided to see what my cable provider offers me by way of free On Demand content. Perusing the channels available to me, and with so limited an attention span that I didn’t make it past the “A”s, I stumbled upon Animal Planet On Demand - where I found, and spent the next hour laughing at, Animal Planet rags-to-riches show Underdog to Wonderdog. 

The premise of the show: a ragtag group of semi-authority figures/animal enthusiasts/psychos Animal Planet picked up hovering around the adoption cages at Petsmart pool their intellectual resources to rehabilitate a stray dog in preparation for its new life with an adopted family.

There’s: 
Andrea - Trainer
Ali - Groomer
David - Canine Carpenter
Ryan - Team Leader

First of all, what? If I were Andrea in this scenario, I’d be like “What the fuck? Why do these other douches even get credit? Team Leader!? What does that even mean?!” Having to train a wild dog is just a bit more complicated than building him a doggy house, or supervising someone else building him a doggy house. How does one get to be a “canine carpenter” anyway? Is it special, like getting a veterinary license? Are there certificates involved?

So the show starts with our heroes gathering together in a local coffee shop, which is already weird since why wouldn’t you just meet wherever the dog in need is? In any case, Ryan thanks everyone for coming, which suggests his role might simply be top of the phone tree. (When you’ve got a doggy carpenter on staff, it’s conceivable that phone tree originator would be considered a leadership role).

So after TL Ryan tells the gang about their latest case - the unfortunately named Brownie - it’s action team go. They meet up with:

Jorge - Rescuer
Ami - Veterinarian

Except for TL Ryan, who reveals his new (and perhaps tantamount) role as Finder of Naive Family Willing to Take In Diseased Dog, the rest of the gang meets Brownie, who is - of course - adorable and depressing and who somehow, despite the bajillion of stray dogs that come in every day, manages to make even the dog rescuer tear up - and now the quest begins to bring Brownie back to health.

(A quest that is, by the way, only two weeks - like as though what would really lend sincerity to the show was a superfluous deadline).

In any case, they start by pampering Brownie - with a limo, a hotel room and a ridiculous number of dog toys. This is before like, a bath. Like, this dog has been eating SHIT, on the STREET, where he LIVES. His priorities are not with plastic that squeaks.

The group reconvenes in a basement that looks suspiciously like the coffee shop to watch a video TL Ryan has procured about what he considers the perfect adoptive family. I got a little excited here, thinking that they might show a series of videos and then have The Team pick apart prospective families’ ability to care for other living creatures, but Animal Planet disappoints; instead we meet the Pratts, an eclectic family of freaks who clearly love adopting things as they already have one rescue dog and one little Chinese girl daughter. But of course they’re perfect - one of the non-adopted children has Down’s  Syndrome, and their current adopted dog Marsha is timid in the way only rescue dogs can be - the heartbreaking Sarah McLachlan ASPCA way.

But back to Brownie, who’s now finally getting the much-needed bath, as well an hour or so of “touch therapy,” administered by a scrub-wearing nurse who babbles on about the pressure points like it’s acupuncture when in reality she’s basically being paid to pet a dog. We find out Brownie’s pneumonia is really bad and he has fluid in his lungs, which would be awful except this is Animal Planet and we know they wouldn’t disappoint a child with Down’s Syndrome. Trainer Andrea discovers Brownie doesn’t even know “sit” or “down” (personally I think he does and realized this was his shot to pretend otherwise) and spends the next million hours training him, which Animal Planet thankfully reduces to a montage.

Then the canine carpenter stalks around the backyard planning an elaborate doghouse that he talks about with enough enthusiasm you’d think it was a medieval castle. Which it might as well be, since what he eventually creates is big enough to house an entire family of midgets.

When Brownie finally does meet his new family, I’m crying, they’re crying, The Team is crying, and I realize this show has, somehow, roped me in. I convince myself Brownie’s latent wild tendencies will come out in a month or so when he bites one of the kids’ thumbs off as they reach for his food bowl.

Then the Pratt family father gets weepy because Brownie licked his face (stupid Marsha doesn’t like cuddling), and Jorge ceremonially tosses out Brownie’s counterintuitive “Stray” collar, and David reveals a cupboard full of heavily sponsored Purina dog food (at which point the family has to be thinking “Uh, what did you do with all our other, regular people food?”) and I come back down to Earth.