Season two of Animal Planet’s Meerkat Manor came out on Tuesday. The popular reality TV-style show closely follows a family of meerkats, dubbed “the Whiskers,” one of about a dozen meerkat families that’ve been part of an ongoing study conducted by Cambridge University scientists over the past decade.

And… I made a mistake a few weeks ago.

I said, “Erik! Request me Season Two of Meerkat Manor! I will totally write a review of it for the blog!”

This was a mistake because, while Meerkat Manor is undeniably compelling, it's also incredibly stressful. The last time I watched multiple episodes, it was while heavily self-medicating myself through a bad breakup. Watching back-to-back episodes without the benefit of Percocet is not recommended.

The show's premise is simple but incredibly effective: The meerkats are given names—Flower, Mozart, Zaphod—and their daily struggles for food and territory are dramatized, reality-TV style. Much is made of the turf wars between the Whiskers and neighboring families the Lazuli and the Commandoes, as well as the Whiskers' family bonds and the individual personalities of each meerkat. Thing is, though: Nature is mean. Nature kills the cutest meercats. I don't want to give anything away, so... let's just say that it's one thing to watch an OBP show where a cheetah takes down a zebra; it'd be totally a different thing if you knew that the zebra's name was Sandra and that she had a husband named Edgar. I don't know how Samwise Gamgee manages to narrate without breaking into sobs every few scenes.

It's hard to review this two-disc set because it's not like the show's schtick has changed at all from season 1. It's more of the same: The meerkats fight, have tiny adorable babies, hide from goshawks. Sometimes they die, or disappear and don't come back. Sometimes they play-fight and it's really freaking cute.

The narration (provided by Sean Astin) can be florid: when we are told, for example, that Flower "has a thorn in her side"; or when one meerkat is described as a "wayward daughter." This gives the impression that events are controlled, choreographed, that the meerkats are characters playing roles that have been scripted for them, an impression reinforced by a syrupy score, and by contrived "cliffhangers" that rarely deliver the promised dramatic payoff. All these machinations, though, make it even more startling when nature's harshest realities really do intrude.

While I like this show in theory, I had a hard time making it through the second disk. These would be great to have on the shelf for those Saturday nights when you and a couple friends are kinda drunk and kinda high and don't really feel like going out and you've already watched all your TiVo'd episodes of Project Runway. Watching it alone, sober, it's hard not to dwell on just how bleak life can be.