As a culture, we accepted long ago that the genre of television we call Reality TV has a complicated relationship with the word for which it is named. Although “reality” seeps through and informs Reality TV, many of the most popular examples of the form could be better described as “lies we all agree to believe because it is fun.”
This phenomenon has stretched so far that when a reality show comes along that harkens back to (actual) reality, it is all the more impressive. I’d long heard the arguments along these lines being made for Alone, and speaking as a newcomer to the series, I’m here to say: the legends are true.
Survivor, guaranteed a place on the Reality TV Mount Rushmore, has always marketed itself as something that tests its contestants to the limit, reducing them to their most primal elements in a fight against nature. But over the years, it has slowly stripped away many of the survival elements to end up as something closer to ‘Big Brother on an island’.
Alone takes the ethos at the heart of how Survivor is marketed (and has arguably never lived up to) and runs with it, dropping participants into remote locations with limited supplies (no food or water) and leaving them to their own devices.
I’d always assumed each episode was about one person’s experience, but ten people do the feat concurrently. The one who lasts the longest without ‘tapping out’ or failing a medical check, wins $500,000.
All ten are all in the same general area, so they’re dealing with the same kind of environment, but they are spaced out to the point where they won’t come into contact with each other. And apart from drop-off, pick-up and background stuff, they’re doing all the filming themselves with cameras provided by production.
This fact alone (ahem) lends an intimate verisimilitude to Alone that is nowhere to be found in most reality shows. It also means that some dramatic things might be missed, but the aesthetics of filming yourself in the wild beneficially evoke the creepiness of found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project.
In addition to the many practical challenges of surviving in the wild—finding drinkable water and a food source, building a shelter and a fire, assessing threats from local wildlife, just to name a few—the most trying aspect of this show appears to be the solitude.
I guess that’s why they call it what they call it.
So many Reality TV shows claim to push participants to their breaking point, but nothing is as good at doing that as one’s own thoughts. It lends considerable weight to the individual journeys experienced by each participant, and I never lost sight of how these emotional highs and lows weren’t simply the result of calculated drama creation.
There is no host, no voiceover, and no reward challenges. The interviews that pepper most Reality TV shows are often referred to as ‘confessionals’ and are generally used to help structure the narrative. In this show, we have people reduced to their sparsest selves desperately communicating to a camera like it’s their last link to humanity— ‘confessionals’ have never lived up to their name more.
At its best, Alone speaks to how reality TV has become so calculated that pure examples of the form like this have come all the way back around to documentary in some ways.
Each season of the show takes place in a different area, and the latest, season twelve (which is where I dropped in), occurs in the Great Karoo desertous region in South Africa, which I gather stands in contrast to the snowier climates that recent seasons have highlighted.
Something else I didn’t realise about this show until I watched it, and which is repeatedly made clear by the “don’t try this at home” disclaimer, is that all of the participants have some level of survival skills. Which makes sense in retrospect, and is probably why nobody has yet died doing this.
Although the ten participants do the challenge concurrently, the season takes its time introducing everyone, usually focusing on three or four per episode, depending on how soon they start dropping out or getting sick.
Season twelve introduces us to people like Will, an exotic animal trapper, which seems like a relevant skill; Katie from Australia, who teaches survival skills for a living and catches a fish on her first night; and Kelsey, who lives off the grid in Montana and looks very natural holding a massive bow.
Water is an immediately pressing issue for everyone, but on Kelsey’s first explore, she hears a screech in the distance, and wonders aloud if it might be a baboon, a concept that causes me to snort. Turns out, it’s a baboon. In fact, many baboons. This shit is real.
Indeed, I was also surprised by how much the dangers posed by local wildlife are a factor here. We learn early on that participants were encouraged to make walking sticks to poke for snakes around rocks. Yikes.
These amateur cinematographers don’t always get the shot—later in the season, when Kelsey successfully shoots a warthog, she is understandably not able to capture it on camera. But we do witness her butcher the warthog with framing worthy of Kubrick.
Another notable participant in season twelve is Nathan, who it turns out is the son of Larry Dean Nelson, who wrote a widely-read booked called Outdoor Survival Skills. So this guy is the son of the guy who literally wrote the book on what to do in this situation. No pressure, Nelson.
When someone taps out, it is naturally always an emotionally fraught moment. There are moments of serenity amidst the survival challenges. But not many.
Shelters collapse. Weather changes. Strength depletes. And only one thing is for sure: bugs will be eaten.
Removing competitions and rewards might seem a drama-draining move, but once you click in to the rhythms of Alone, the drama exists on a much more profound level. This isn’t about betrayal or falling off a log or being voted out, it’s about facing yourself and your limitations. By yourself.
