‘Doomsday Preppers’ second season preview

You don’t need Mayans or even R.E.M. to tell you it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Just look at the recent string of natural disasters, economic breakdowns or if your candidate lost the election Tuesday.

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It’s making some people dig backyard bunkers like they haven’t since the Cold War, stock food as if the supermarkets weren’t and build up arsenals worthy of a small private army.

And it’s helped make “Doomsday Preppers,” which depicts all of these activities, the top-rated program on the National Geographic Channel.

As the show embarks on its second season, “Doomsday Preppers” has become a hit in part because of the paranoia and survivalist instincts it conjures, a popular theme it shares with scripted hits such as “The Walking Dead” and “Revolution.”

“Preppers” also succeeds because National Geographic can have it both ways, providing its dire and extreme predictions for one audience while endlessly amusing skeptics with an array of colorful characters sporting gas masks and armed with Super Soakers full of homemade pepper spray. The kind of folks who are often compelled to begin their interviews by declaring, “I am not a nut.”

The title for the new season’s first episode, in fact, is “Am I Nuts or Are You?” It features an obese Nashville music producer who is preparing to enhance his underground bunker with an even more protective old fuel tank. Whatever his nuclear fallout survival techniques, “I am not going to drink my own urine,” Big Al assures the camera crew.

This differentiates him from Robert Earl, who moved to the Texas high desert to avoid rising ocean levels. He’s self-fertilizing what he calls his “poop garden.”

The humorous aspects of “Preppers” have been vigorously promoted by the network, which was once known for travelogues and nature films. Stephen Colbert has called it one of his favorite shows. It’s also been endorsed by Jennifer Lawrence of “The Hunger Games,” which you could classify as a (wholly fictional) prepper film. Posters for “Preppers” remake images of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” with gas masks.

And some of the scenes in the show seem staged for laughs, such as one of a paperboy who tosses a paper onto a perfectly manicured driveway in suburban Clarke County, Va., only to face a small militia of neighbors with automatic weaponry.

But it’s always serious business for the people depicted — even the couple in Mishawaka, Ind., trying to fund their stockpiling by selling sex toys.

With ominous music and a breathy, deadly serious narrator, “Preppers” spends much of its time fanning the perceived threat even as the subjects beef up their stockpiles and organize drills.

At the end of each segment, a team of experts from a North Carolina company called Practical Preppers gives a score on how ready the subject is, along with how many days his or her supplies could reasonably last. The assessment is followed by the kicker: a disclaimer that whatever fear the preppers are furiously preparing against is usually in­cred­ibly remote.