The Abandoned Engineering TV Documentary Series

Recently whist playing with Galaxus TV which is just free to air television, made available via Galaxus rather than a satellite dish I have been able to revert to the habit of watching niche documentaries, as I used to years ago, when I lived in a house with a satellite dish.

The beauty of broadcast television, in contrast to streaming services, is that you have high quality content that was good enough for broadcast. The other advantage is that content is available two to three episodes per day, rather than all at once as is the case with Netflix, among other platforms.

The Series

Abandoned Engineering is a documentary series that explores abandoned buildings, complexes, aircrafts and more. It looks at places of interest on every continent. It covers citadels, cave cities, castles, follie, hospitals and many more buildings. Some are ancient and some are modern. Yet more are being given a new lease of life.

For many of the places and sites you have subject matter experts providing specific information about a place, and their link to it. In other cases you have three to six people commenting on various aspects of each site.

On Style

In some cases the reality TV style presenting feels kitsch and that detracts from my interest in the series. It would be fine without the sensationalism.

I also question whether those that are seen commenting on every bit of engineering have visited the sites that they are talking about, or if they’re just reading their script. The background for these interventions is always the same. It gives the impression that they just read their script for each epside at once, in a studio, and then went about doing other things.

Still in Production

The series is 14 seasons strong so far, and has been going since 2016. New episodes are still being created at the time of writing.

The Value

For me, the value of such a series is that it presents us with three to four interesting bits of abandoned engineering each episode. We learn about castles with deep underground tunnel networks. We learn of a castle with more than twenty kilometres of walls.

We also learn of hotels and palaces that thrived until a natural disaster, or government policy change. With these documentaries we might be inspired to travel more. We might even find out about interesting places that are not far away.

And Finally

With Netflix, YouTube and other sites, you see what algorithms think you want to see. With Galaxus TV and broadcast TV you see what is being broadcast when you’re curious and this provides you with interesting suggestions. It encourages you to watch content that you would not, otherwise, come across.

I have around four seasons left to watch. I don’t know how many I already watched.