TV: Body Story

Most documentary programs about the human body are clinical, detached, and altogether divorced from everyday life. It's easy to see some poor soul on a high-tech operating table and forget that everyone, every human being, has basically the same parts. It's not just the patients that you see on the show that have all those complex, 3D-rendered organs - you have them, too.


"Body Story" is a neat twist on all of that - it follows the lives of fictional average people as things happen to their bodies. From an invading flu virus to old age, various maladies and conditions of the body are explored in a visceral, down-to-earth way. My particular favorite is the episode that follows the internal injuries caused by a car crash - you literally wince at some of the stuff that is going wrong.

In some ways, it reminds me of the classic "Body Wars" ride in Disney World. The body, and its repair and defense machanisms, are your soldiers in the neverending struggle for survival. It's a struggle that everyone loses eventually, I suppose, but the important thing is to try.