I'm going to petition the Emmy people to open a new category for an award. They can call it "Best Dreckumentary." "Dreckumentary" is a hybrid word, combining "dreck", an old Yiddish word meaning "crap", and the Latin "umentary", which means "You really did mean to watch this".

Dreckumentaries are shows which claim to be investigative but are so obviously staged that the cue-card guy might as well be on camera.

A good example of a dreckumentary would be UFO Hunters on the History
Channel.

Here we have assembled a group of stock characters: the Professor (so darkly handsome in a scholarly way); the Tech Nerd (whose curly hair has been groomed with an eggbeater, which is a dead giveaway that he is the secret rule-breaker of the team); and the Grizzled Veteran adventurer (who is always in his safari jacket and wears his aviator glasses no matter what the weather or time of day, clueing us in to the fact that he defies nature as well as the fashinistas).

These poor people don't even get a change of clothes, for heaven's sake. Do the producers think that the audience is so dumb that they wouldn't recognize the G. V. if he dumped those stupid shades?

Each episode begins with a short synopsis of  an "event" that took place involving UFO sightings. Like the episode where the entire town of Darien, Illinois, was treated to a flotilla of strange objects in the sky. I live in Chicago, which is not far from there, and, believe me, if anything was on the news about an alien invasion, I would remember it. So, I wonder where the story came from in the first place.

Each episode is richly illustrated with scenes of the actual sighting locations, illustrations of what the eyewitnesses described, and, of course, eyewitness and expert interviews.

The team goes to the scene of the sighting to look for "evidence" that proves the ecounter took place. They run around with their little gadgets like Spock on a new planet, only to discover, ultimately, that the lab analysis was botched, the data was incorrectly stored, or that some other malfunction has taken place to invalidate the experiment.

Our team leaves us with the earnest statement that they have shown us what probably happened when aliens may have visited this little corner of Earth.

Anyway, I am nominating UFO Hunters for an Emmy. Monster Quest, also on the History Channel,  would be a good competitor. Maybe Ghost Hunters on Syfy would win.

Does anyone out there have a nominee of their own?