Death Knocks (Again) at 'Meerkat Manor'

"Last year was tragic and we lost a lot of our major characters," the show's senior executive producer, Mick Kaczorowski, told The TV Column.

Last season alone, he said, three meerkats met their Maker. Mozart, "the caring one," was killed by a jackal outside her burrow.

Carlos, "the horny one," was bitten in the face during a fight with Hannibal, the dominant male of another colony, an infection set in and that was all he wrote.

And of course, Flower, "the iron-pawed, fearless leader," met her end after being bitten in the face by a Cape cobra while protecting a litter of newborn pups.

This coming season, Kaczorowski promised, "is really a very different season than you've ever seen before . . . -- laugh-out-loud funny, sexy, sassy -- not like last season."

Except the death thing, of course.

"It's kind of what we have to deal with in the natural world, unfortunately," Kaczorowski said of the hit-and-run. Which seemed odd -- we are talking about roadkill here, not a Cape cobra bite. We mentioned this to him.

"Meerkats are part of the Kalahari scenery and people are now part of the Kalahari scenery and cars are part of the Kalahari scenery and cattle are now part of the Kalahari scenery," he responded philosophically. We aren't sure what the cattle reference was to, in a conversation about the harshness of meerkat life, but it definitely sounds ominous.

"It's one of those hard things," Kaczorowski said. "Unlike 'Desperate Housewives' we have no control over the story structure or the plotline."