Henry Rollins came to television in an unusual manner: the former Black Flag frontman appeared on MTV’s “Alternative Nation” and “MTV Sports” in the early ’90s while he was still the lead singer of Rollins Band. Since then, he’s dabbled in work as both an actor and a TV host while he’s not touring as a spoken-word artist, traveling to support the USO and other activist causes, or otherwise engaged in his multi-hyphenate career (author, radio host, publisher, and so on).

Recently returned from a visit to southern Sudan and Uganda with Drop in the Bucket, an organization that provides water and sanitation facilities in Africa, Rollins spoke to me last Wednesday about his recent television career — from the “Sons of Anarchy” set to his infamous run-in with hipsters on German television (“They’re soft children”) to his upcoming appearances on National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild. The interview has been edited for clarity and length, with multimedia added where applicable.

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Henry Rollins is one of my favorite people on Earth. Whether he’s playing a Nazi gang rapist on “Sons of Anarchy” or confronting hipsters on German TV, the man just pisses intensity. And later this month he’ll be studying that anger on National Geographic:

National Geographic Channel’s Explorer: Born to Rage? investigates the discovery behind a single “warrior gene” directly associated with violent behavior.  With bullying and violent crime making headlines, this controversial finding stirs up the nature-versus-nurture debate.  Now, Henry Rollins goes in search of carriers from diverse, sometimes violent backgrounds who agree to be tested for the genetic mutation.  Who has the warrior gene?  And are all violent people carriers? The results turn assumptions upside down. [Nat Geo]

You know what needs turning upside down? Some furniture that gets in Henry Rollins’s way. I would pay good money to sit safely behind plexiglass while he destroyed an IKEA showroom.

Anyway, you can watch a preview below. It opens with Rollins punching a fan while onstage, and then somehow gets even better.

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Restrepo (National Geographic) — The television premiere of Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s critically acclaimed documentary about a U.S. Army platoon holding remote outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley (where Sal Giunta won his Medal of Honor). I haven’t watched this yet, but I’ve yet to hear anything bad about it. (Photo credit: Tim Hetherington. Trailers embedded below.)

Skating with the Stars (ABC) — Yeah, watch this instead of the documentary about American servicemen fighting the Taliban. That’s cool.

Chuck (NBC) — Linda Hamilton and Timothy Dalton guest star, making this the biggest episode of the season for time travelers from 1987.

Cake Boss (TLC) — Season finale. Tune in for a new season in, like, three weeks.

The Buried Life (MTV) — Season finale. Next on the young people’s bucket list: make $1 million from $25,000. Ooooh, I hope they put it in a mutual fund! This should be fascinating!

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“Sizing Up Sperm,” which first aired on National Geographic this past Sunday, took a highly unusual approach in its examination of human reproduction: the show used human actors to represent individual sperm cells, scaling up the act of insemination to epic proportions. In case you’re no good at metaphors, the valley in the picture above represents a vagina. Hee hee! From the absolutely magnificent press release:

The story begins in the testicle — depicted as a building that would be 3,000 feet, more than double the height of the Empire State Building, if the sperm were human-sized. Next it’s a high-speed evacuation from the skyscraper along a 10-mile, ultra-fast water slide to the female, where the constant barrage of threats begin. For the sperm, landing in the female’s vagina is like storming the beaches on D-Day, only facing chemical weapons in the form of a deadly acid attack on the hundreds of millions of invaders. [sounds like sex with a Kardashian. Zing!]

The survivors press on into the cervix high above them. In our people-sized sperm world that would mean climbing a ladder a mile into the sky, a gravity-defying feat that only a few will achieve. Once the heights have been scaled, they reach a cervix Stephen King style. It consists of hundreds of tiny branching tunnels that trap, crush and slowly kill sperm. From here, the remaining sperm enter the uterus, the equivalent of a two-mile-long field at these proportions. But this picturesque countryside is far from serene. Here the sperm are ambushed by the female’s natural assassins, large white blood cells that dismantle the trespassing sperm. For the tiny fraction left, it’s on to the fallopian tubes, where the egg may be waiting. One last obstacle remains — a freestyle swimming final of Olympic proportions, where the winner gains immortality, and the rest are killed.

Ha ha, it’s funny because sex! But seriously, killing all the losers would make the “Real World/Road Rules Challenge” totally watchable.

(“Sizing Up Sperm” airs again this Sunday. See videos below for more.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is a clip from “DogTown: The Road Home” on National Geographic, which you probably saw on Friday night if you’re a depressing loser who prefers animals to science fiction shows. It’s about Tuli, an overweight chihuahua/pug mix that looks like — and I’m quoting the video here — “a fruit bat that swallowed a pineapple.” (Funny, I thought your mom was the only one who could swallow a pineapple.) The whole thing is pretty adorable and funny until the preachy lesson about canine obesity starts around the 2:15 mark. Then it becomes this depressing montage of fat dogs. If those dogs were people they’d totally shop at Wal-Mart.