The corporate homsars got ahold of this one, so it has different names like “Air Crash Investigators” outside the JCSA, but this is a collaboration between Canadian filmmakers, the Smithsonian, and National Geographic that takes a Forensic Files approach to technical failures in aviation.

Now, very little will displace Forensic Files as the best television program ever made, but Mayday: Air Disaster follows the same format: backtrack from the event to the diagnosis to ultimately show us what really went wrong.

Expect top-notch acting. These Canadian actors are probably dead from fent overdoses now, but they are quite talented, just not in the “Hollywood” way of being charismatic and vague. They act out not just the event, but the investigators who have to dig through the wreckage and find the cause.

In that lies the appeal of this show: it is really a detective series or a horror movie masquerading as a documentary. The unknown strikes and a plane goes down; the detectives move in to use forensic methods (and ruthless interrogations) to figure out who screwed up and where, then fix it.

You might notice that this completes the arc of not just horror, but westerns and detective fiction: something against which we are powerless appears, and we gradually learn enough to at least mostly defeat it. This also fits within the Forensic Files or American Detective world.

Watchers of this program could not be blamed if they never get on a plane again, but the richness of technical detail, the clarity of the logical analysis, and the bravery of the people involved create an almost theological faith in function over appearance.

Nothing else on television comes really close. This series is a confrontation between human solipsism and the whole of reality, and it shows us slowly winning the war against the limits in our heads.

Tags: cinema, forensic files, mayday: air disaster, television