I ended up quite liking The River, ABC’s delightful piece of horror movie cheese about a reality show crew stuck on a boat in the Amazon searching for a vanished television star, which ended its first, and likely only, season last night. But I think that might be because I finally decided to read it as a show about a bunch of irritating white people (and one endearing gay, black cameraman, who informed his coworkers that his sexual orientation hadn’t come up on their trip because “I don’t go clubbing when I’m running away from ghosts.”) who got what was coming to them because they treated the Amazon as a mysterious place and ignored reasonable knowledge about the place that was available to them.

That’s really the core of the show: the main characters in The River treat the Amazon basin as a dark, mysterious place that can be made comprehensible by Western explorers who will approach it rationally. Rather than a place populated by, you know, actual people, it’s full of mysterious tribesmen, ghost ships, and cures for diseases that have a nasty tendency to zombiefy scientists if proper treatment protocols aren’t observed. Dr. Emmet Cole got himself in trouble in the first place when he strayed from his rational principles and started believing there was something mystical out there. That conviction lead him to take insane risks that endangered the life of his crew and his long-term friends, and also lead Cole into sin. His decision to abandon Jonas to a state in between life and death is reprehensible, the kind of thing that people who don’t happen to be pursuing wacky vision quests are relatively certain they’d never do.

But the truth is, for all the crew of the Magus are convinced that they can use logic and deduction to find Emmet, they’re awfully incurious people, by both the standards of Western rationality and beyond it. Maybe it wouldn’t serve the interests of the show to have them interrogate what in God’s name Emmet is doing in a giant chrysalis. But that seems like it might be a fairly relevant question to try to answer before he and Lincoln get to work on their mess of a relationship or he and Tess get all lovey-dovey again (if it were me, no matter how much I loved my missing husband, I would want to know what’s up there before I let him get near my lady bits).

And it’s deeply frustrating that, despite the fact that Jahel Valenzuela tends to be right about almost all the misfortunes that befall the Magus, and to have the power to summon resurrecting goddesses to boot, no one ever seems to have sat her down and done a comprehensive download on her knowledge of religion, folklore, biology, etc. The show’s getting somewhere in its critique of Western know-it-allism with scenes of scientists dissecting the native people of the region and keeping them in specimen tanks. But it’s not quite getting a central point. Emmet Cole might have had a better sense of a country that’s only Undiscovered to him and his ilk, and the scientists in that creepy lab might have increased the world’s store of knowledge more if they relied a little less on their own sense of their abilities, and tried a bit harder to talk to and learn from the people around them.

If you’re going to pick someone to go missing and be need of rescue, can you do better than Bruce Greenwood? The veteran actor was a trouper while facing torture by mind control slug in the last Star Trek movie, and as vanished Amazonian explorer Dr. Emmet Cole in The River it’s easy to sympathize with the family that doesn’t want to give up on him. I generally liked the rest of The River, ABC’s new horror show about Cole’s disappearance and the team of reality television producers and scientists who teams up to return to the Amazon to find him, that premiered last night, too. Horror isn’t necessarily my favorite genre, but considerations of environmentalism and the ethics of reality television definitely are.

I appreciate that the show isn’t shy about about connecting Cole’s affection to the wild to a political worldview. “He was a passionate environmentalist,” one of the people eulogizing him says in news reports of his disappearance. But the show isn’t entirely clear on its relationship to that worldview. Cole’s explorations got him killed, or at least disappeared, and it’s clear that the time he sacrificed to his explorations that he could have spent with his family has left his son Lincoln with mixed feelings about the wilderness his father loved. “He missed my life to inspire a billion people I could give a shit about. There’s no magic out there,” he tells his mother. And later, he tells Lena, the daughter of another explorer who’s gone missing with Emmet, that “Science isn’t a great big wonder anymore. Discoveries are made in the lab, not the jungle.” It’s a perspective that downplays preserving the wild and focuses instead on the importance of human ingenuity and industry. But rather than just letting that statement sit, Lincoln gets pulled back into the jungle as his father sees it. Flooded by dragonflies, he admits to Lena, “Okay, that was pretty cool.”

That same canniness is present in the show’s examination of the ethics of reality television. Tess, Emmet’s wife and Lincoln’s mother, first shows up as the love of Emmet’s life. When we next see her, she’s meeting Lincoln in a bar, bringing cameras in to film her conversation with her grieving son who believes he’s just buried his father, telling him “They won’t pay if you won’t go.” Her behavior’s repulsive, but it’s also driven by need rather than pure greed: this is the way she can finance the search for her missing husband. Lincoln is surly around the crew once they’re on the river. “So Lincoln, tell us about your relationship with your father,” a producer asks him, only to get the entirely appropriate response of “Go fuck yourself.” (A side note, I appreciate that the characters are swearing like they would if they were real humans under stressful situations.) But by the end of the show, Lincoln’s playing along. After a touching, and theoretically private, moment between Tess and Lincoln, she points out that there’s a camera watching them—but he knows. She may be using him to get back to the river, but Lincoln has an agenda of his own.

There’s been a lot of conversation about reality television as horror show, especially in the wake of Russell Armstrong’s suicide. But things like The River and The Hunger Games are upping the stakes and trying to find a limit to what we’d let ourselves be entertained by—and what people will do to entertain us.