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A still from the CBS drama series ‘Fire Country’ \n <\/p>\n
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A still from the CBS drama series ‘Fire Country’<\/p>\n
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The new CBS drama series Fire Country<\/em>about a group of prisoners turned volunteer firefighters in Northern California, is aflame with the raging pyrotechnics and human melodrama that audiences have come to expect from pop culture takes on wildfires and the people who bravely tackled them. <\/p>\nThe show was the highest-ranked TV series when it debuted in October and continues to attract millions of viewers.<\/p>\n
But despite its popularity with the public, Fire Country<\/em> hasn’t been a big hit with firefighters. <\/p>\n“It’s just another traumatized Hollywood production,” Eugene, Oregon-based firefighter Megan Bolten told NPR. <\/p>\n
Fire Country<\/em> executive producer Tony Phelan said he understands the pushback. <\/p>\n“But we are not making a documentary,” said Phelan. “And so there are certain compromises that we make for dramatic purposes.” <\/p>\n
The disconnect between pop culture and real life<\/h3>\n The frustration firefighters feel highlights the disconnect between the portrayal of wildfires in pop culture and the realities of wildfire response in a time of accelerated climate change.<\/p>\n
Part of the issue is that movies and TV shows about wildfires haven’t changed much since they first blazed across our screens in the middle of the last century. <\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\nMelodramatic scenes of heroic, cleft-chinned firefighters charging fearlessly at enemy fires were a thing back in the 1940s and 1950s in movies like The Forest Rangers<\/em> and Red Skies of Montana<\/em>.<\/p>\nAnd they’re still very much a thing today, in movies like Only the Brave <\/em>and Those Who Wish Me Dead<\/em>and TV series such as Fire Country<\/em> and Fire Chasers<\/em>.<\/p>\nFirefighter Bolten said it’s high time Hollywood let go of these exaggerated, oversimplified and often inaccurate clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
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“Its aim is to entertain more than it is to inform,” Bolten said.<\/p>\n
Instead, Bolten said, Hollywood should share messages about things like the usefulness of controlled burns to clear out overgrown brush, the public’s role in wildfire prevention, and how climate change is turning wildlands across the world into tinderboxes. <\/p>\n
\u201cIntroducing the complexity of the conversation that’s actually happening in fire and climate change and fuels management would be a huge help,\u201d Bolten said.<\/p>\n
The glaring absence of climate change in scripted dramas<\/h3>\n According to a recent study from the climate change storytelling consultancy Good Energy and the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center, less than 3% of the more than 37,000 analyzed movie and TV scripts written between 2016 and 2020 made any reference to climate change. <\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\n“There is a glaring absence of climate change in scripted media,” said Good Energy associate director of climate research and consulting Alisa Petrosova. “And that’s a problem because stories set the social conditions necessary for change. There’s a huge power in linking climate change to natural disaster.” <\/p>\n
However, scenes featuring discussions about climate change or fire prevention and control methods like a homeowner raking leaves off their lawn or a firefighter digging a ditch, don’t exactly make for scintillating screen-time. <\/p>\n
“Where’s the action? Where’s the drama?” said Arizona State University historian Steve Pyne, who studies the portrayal of wildfires in mass entertainment. “It’s very easy to tell the disaster and war story. It’s much harder to tell the story of preventative stuff.”<\/p>\n
Pyne said despite the dramaturgical challenges, the entertainment industry has a responsibility to get the messaging right, because of its enormous reach. <\/p>\n
“Most people are not reading policy statements,” Pyne said. “They’re not reading the Journal of Ecology<\/em>. They will get it in popular forms.” <\/p>\n