Man vs. Wild is a show where they take a British guy, they drop him off in the wilderness and he spends a few days trying to get back to civilization. They do this all while showing us what we should do if we find ourselves in similar circumstances, as if that would ever happen. The show is great. It is very fun to watch him do various feats and eat weird things. It is like Fear Factor meets Steve Irwin.
Now I had no delusions that this was totally straight forward. I figured how the show operated was pretty much the same as animal shows… it isn’t really spontaneous but is set up to some degree. I figured how it worked with Man vs. Wild (or MvW) was that they planned a route, had people go scout the route for interesting features, maybe had Bear (the host) go through and see some of the parts, had him study directions, and then figured out and practiced various survival techniques for this particular trip. So in essence the trip is real, but completely planned, down to the “stumbling upon the orange orchard in the everglades.”
However, I found out that this is just half the show. They not only do all of the above, but the host also spends the nights in hotels, and the crew sets up everything for him. One example given was that the crew made a raft on a deserted island, then disassembled it so that Bear could re-assemble it on camera alone, basically providing him with lego pieces to do it.
To me this calls into question the whole show. When he drank his own urine in the Australian outback, I wonder if he was really drinking Kool-Aid. When he was complaining about being so alone and demoralized in the cold snow cave he built himself in the Alps, I know now that he just returned to his hotel 5 minutes afterwards to see his wife. The whole thing is done.
It is too bad really cause it was a show that I really enjoyed, but at this point is nothing more than any other show, just with less story. It isn’t real, it is fictional. Channel 4 (the UK channel that caries the show over there) has responded to the allegations basically saying that “they never said that he was actually doing these things unassisted.” Well that’s not entirely true, the whole show is marketed as if he is actually in the wilderness surviving, and now we know he isn’t. The format of the show dictates that he is unassisted, with only a camera guy to take film.
The whole thing really reminds me of that quiz show from the early 70s in which they fed the answers to contestants and coached them how to answer the questions to make the show more interesting. The format of a quiz show says they aren’t feeding answers to contestants, however the network could have always said “we never said we weren’t” which is true, but then they saw themselves on a losing side of a federal investigation. Will there be a federal investigation here? I doubt it, in those days the government was interested in their citizens not being deceived, now a days they are only interested in deceiving.