Ellen Gray: 'Doomsday Preppers' get ready for the endtimes

* DOOMSDAY PREPPERS. 9 and 10 p.m. Tuesday, Nat Geo.

"THOUSANDS IN Northeast still without power," read a headline on CNN as I was getting ready to write about Tuesday's Season 2 premiere of Nat Geo's "Doomsday Preppers."

Hurricane Sandy may not have figured in the end-of-the-world scenarios of the families profiled on the show, but unless you've been living under a particularly well-equipped rock, chances are there's something in your home that wasn't there a month ago, whether it's a fresh stash of D batteries or a case of canned soup.

So I was prepared to be less snarky than usual about "Preppers," whose subjects tend to take the Boy Scout motto to extremes.

It's hard, though, when the first "prepper" introduced in Tuesday night's back-to-back episodes is "Big Al," an unironically nicknamed Nashville, Tenn., musician who's written a song about prepping that ends: "You'd better hope someday that the joke's on me."

Even 007 isn't fighting the Cold War anymore, but Al remains convinced Russian nukes are the threat worth preparing for.

"Russia is Russia is Russia," he says as he goes about the business of adding to the underground bunker where he already lives - all by his lonesome - three months out of every year.

If you can call it living.

Still, I'm not losing sleep about Big Al. By the end of his segment in the episode "Am I Nuts or Are You?" he's at least realized that taking better care of himself should be part of any plan.

I'm saving my concern for a 15-year-old in Plato, Mo., who's "preparing for anarchy following the economic collapse" by drilling with guns and constructing weapons out of bats and nails.

"Jason has always been a worrywart," says his mother, who's clearly more worried about Jason than she is about his ever actually needing the food he's been periodically siphoning from her grocery runs for his private stockpile.

Jason, it turns out, has been prepping for disaster since the age of 11. And yet the only experts called in to this case are the unseen representatives of Practical Preppers, the outfit that grades "Doomsday Preppers" participants on their level of readiness. Maybe a second opinion would be in order in some cases.

Not that everyone in "Doomsday Preppers" is equally gung-ho.

In August, Nat Geo brought a family from Utah, the Southwicks, to Beverly Hills, Calif., to speak with reporters about their participation in the premiere. (Theirs is the third segment in the first hour.)

In the show, Kara Southwick comes off as more tolerant than terrified as her husband, Braxton, a mechanic, plans for a smallpox attack.

What's not mentioned on the show is that Braxton and Kara Southwick and their six children, who live outside Salt Lake City, are Mormon. "It is a tenet of the Mormon religion that you should be self-reliant and that you should have a year's supply of food storage," Kara Southwick told reporters, placing her superbly stocked pantry in a context the show fails to.

" @elgray

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