the unexpected poetry of reality survival television
in which i make a case for the History channel competition series "Alone"
Note: This newsletter contains spoilers for season 7 of the reality TV series “Alone”.
For the most part, I am not a reality television person. I have not been passionately invested in a reality tv show since the genre’s infancy, when Bret Michaels of Poison fame starred in “Rock of Love,” a reality dating competition on VH1 where Bret quests to find the exotic dancer/car show model of his dreams—a woman who one only hopes would make him feel safe and secure enough to stop wearing his incredibly unconvincing weave.1
True, I burned through a lot of Pawn Stars the last time I was out of work, and once watched enough Vanderpump Rules to make me think I contracted a personality disorder via the television, but I didn’t truly enjoy what I was watching. Then, a couple of weeks ago, two friends2 told me about a reality TV competition series called “Alone.” One night I was bored enough to give it a shot, and was surprised to find myself captivated.
“Alone” is somewhat unique in its conceit. Ten contestants are sent to a remote part of the world with limited equipment and several cameras, and tasked not only with survival but also with documenting their own experience. (They are given some cinematic instruction beforehand, but onsite there is no camera crew to assist them.) Each contestant is randomly assigned a specific parcel of land that measures several square miles, and possessing natural boundaries that ensures they never run into one another. They can “tap out” with a special emergency phone at any point, and can also be pulled from the field for medical reasons by the show’s production staff (weekly surprise “med checks” are their only human interaction for the entirety of their stay). The last person standing wins $500,000.
These contestants are not what you’d consider normal people. Most of them live unconventional off-grid lifestyles, or aspire to; they are screened and their survival skills are pre-evaluated before they compete on the show. They’re hunters, guides, army doctors, herbalists, boatbuilders, and weirdos. They’re from places like Alaska, Montana, Manitoba. From the seasons I’ve seen, only one of them mentions a job that I would consider a traditional white-collar background—season 3’s Britt, who is an accountant in Ohio. (He does pretty well.)
Their humble aspirations make them easy to root for; they all talk about using the prize money for stuff like helping out their family, or just buying the land they already live on. (I have never rooted so hard for anyone as I rooted for season 3’s Greg, who was 53 and just wanted the money to build a house for his daughter and so he could finally retire from being a drywaller.) They are allowed a predetermined list of clothing items (2 pairs underwear, 5 pairs socks, etc), and given a basic first-aid kit. Beyond that, they choose 10 out of 40 listed items to take with them (think: tarp, sleeping bag, axe, knife, gill net, snare wire). They are also allowed to bring one photo. That’s it.
Bushcraft and the practices of wilderness survival are fascinating to a nerd such as myself, but that’s not even the true draw of the show for me. Essentially, these are ten to twelve hour seasons where nothing really happens. The climactic hook of an episode is usually something like “someone has food poisoning from eating unhygienic muskrat meat,” or “someone who was starving caught a very large fish.” Mostly you are watching people traipse around in desolation, felling saplings and gathering berries while openly rambling about how much they miss chocolate pudding and the embrace of the partner they left at home. In solitude, these contestants are reduced to a collection of the human animal’s most primitive needs, and their days are centered around staying warm, boiling water to drink, hoping to find food, and having a safe place to take a crap. Beyond that, they have no distractions and nothing to do, which is precisely where things begin to get interesting.
What “Alone” does have in common with the rest of reality television is that it showcases how the presence of a camera can influence human behavior. The contestants’ cameras become both their audience and their companion, the lone bulwark against their tremendous isolation. Combine that with the power of nature and solitude to elicit self-examination, reminiscence, and transcendence, and you have a powerful formula. Grown men—grizzled, tough, frontier types—break down in tears when they talk about their families (which in many cases, they’ve clearly been taking for granted—but that’s another newsletter altogether). The vulnerability and rawness gradually brought out of these people by their conditions is truly spellbinding.
There are many, many compelling examples of this that I could cite here, but my favorite by far is season 7’s Roland. It may have been opportunistic editing on the part of the show’s producers, but I disliked Roland immediately when he was introduced. “There’s nothing in my personal life holding me back,” he says brusquely in a voiceover, as we watch footage of him packing up and leaving behind his life as a hunting guide in Alaska. He comes off immensely arrogant and macho in a caveman-alpha type of way, which is usually a foolproof indicator of failure on this series.3 But I still had the sense that he would win from the get-go—even before he wounded a musk ox with his bow, tracked it through the brush, and finished it off by stabbing it to death. (A bull musk ox like the one he killed usually weighs between 600 and 800 pounds.)
Over the course of the season, Roland begins to open up, and we get to know him a bit better. He’s definitely an antisocial man, one who feels totally out of place and alienated by the modern world, and who has trouble maintaining human relationships of any kind. At one point, he admits to the camera that his mother died while he was preparing to be on the show, and he was too self-absorbed to even go home to attend her funeral. Slowly and in spurts, Roland begins to unspool the thread of his regret at not making a better effort to know or appreciate his family, as discomfited by the process as he might have been. Coming from a man who uses musk ox brain matter as wilderness hand lotion, this vulnerability is unbelievably rewarding to witness.
Season 7 follows a slightly different format—the prize is a million dollars, to be split by however many contestants can make it to 100 days surviving on the shores of the Great Slave Lake, just south of the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories. And when Roland wakes up on Day 100—unbeknownst to him, the last person standing, as runner-up Callie was pulled for frostbite—he delivers an extemporaneous monologue to his camera that I admit moved me to tears.
Throughout his narration, Roland frequently says “we”, though it’s just him out there, and at one point he openly wonders who it is that he’s including with this choice of pronoun. Back in his tent on the final day, Roland shows the camera a photo of his mother, and says, “All this time, I’ve been saying ‘we’, and I didn’t know who—and it was Mother.” He laughs in surprise. “I’ll bet it was Mother. It is Mother, not was….It is Mother. We did it.” Stoned on my couch late last night, tears streaming down my face, I became convinced this was one of the most beautiful moments of television I had ever seen. In the cold light of day, I don’t think I’m any less certain.
P.S.: At the very least, this show might get you through the winter boredoms, and lest you think it just a pet interest of mine, I have successfully gotten three other people obsessed with this show in the past week. “Alone” seasons 1-6 are free with commercials via Amazon Video, and season 9 is on Netflix.
Like most shows of its kind, “Rock of Love” seemed to mandate a certain level of alcoholism. I have never been able to stop thinking about a scene from “Rock of Love Bus” where one woman drinks a shot from another woman’s vulva, which was so heavily edited by VH1 that I had to rewind it several times to figure out what I was seeing. It’s been almost 20 years and I still think about it. How did she do that? How does that work? Did she put the shot glass, like, in there? Or did she pour it down the other woman’s body, using her anatomy like an ice luge? I will probably go to my grave not knowing.
Props to Joe and Scott.
In the first season, the show’s producers were clearly working out the kinks of who to cast, and made the mistake of selecting a couple “Southern guys who love guns” instead of true back-to-the-land weirdos, with predictable results. I have never laughed harder than when a police officer made his camp basically on top of a black bear den, and got so scared by the bears that he went home on the first night. (Naturally I would also shit myself if confronted by a black bear, but I also know they kill on average fewer than one person a year.)