As far as I know it never screened on the free to air networks in Australia but Born In The Wild is often judged the worst reality show of the past decade. The series, which featured families who were prepared to have their children born in the wild, as opposed to a hospital or at home, was also voted one of the most irresponsible. The vague idea was that giving birth in some remote boondocks location would hark back to an almost primeval time and deliver a profound connection with nature.
Mercifully the series, which first screened in 2015, appeared to have died a natural death, even though (again as far as I know) all of the babies that were born managed to survive. Clearly, reality TV knows few boundaries and the producers are constantly looking at new concepts to reel in the suckers – sorry, I mean the viewers.
Scene from BORN IN THE WILD.
The most recent manifestation sees a mixed lot of contestants stuck either on an island or in some mountainous wilderness; a weekly saga of survival in which the eventual winner gets to take home a million dollar reward. The programs are like a milder version (without the blood and guts) of the 2000 Japanese movie Battle Royale in which a group of high school students are marooned on a godforsaken island. Each fitted with an explosive collar around their necks in case they break the rules, they are encouraged to kill each other until there is only one standing. The lucky winner gets to leave the island and no doubt hang out for a shot at Battle Royale 2.
Both Nine’s The Summit and Seven’s Million Dollar Island are the usual predictable, contrived, reality fodder, over-flowing with human conflict, goodies and baddies, heartbreak, despair and the kind of shameless competitive zeal that a million dollar bounty generates – to put it simply, bullshit, and no doubt most of those who tune in every week would rate it as such. The shows pander pretty much to the lowest common denominator and maybe that’s not such a bad thing when most of the alternative free to air viewing is similarly garbage.
BATTLE ROYALE (2000, Japan). Film still
With AI now becoming an everyday factor in our lives I recently took the opportunity to ask Chat GPT to come up with a series of ideas for new reality shows. I fed in all the usual key words like sex, anger, jealousy, stupidity, a million dollars, nudity, even more nudity, cliff hangers, people hanging off cliffs, babes in bikinis, bearded buffoons and a bedraggled group of contestants running down a normally deserted beach. Wow – here’s just a few of the ratings winners that were generated before you could say ‘Naked Dating In Iceland’.
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK: Twenty hand-picked contestants spend ten episodes searching for a needle in a giant haystack with a promised million dollar prize for anybody who can locate it. In the final episode it’s revealed that there was in fact no needle in the haystack and that the entire show was just a metaphor for achieving the impossible. Twenty hand-picked, now pissed off contestants, are all placated with $50 KFC vouchers.
LILOS DOWN THE AMAZON: There’s a million dollars again for the player who can navigate the 6,400 KM of the Amazon on just a lilo, surviving only on a diet of Spam and Pepsi and with a set of bow and arrows to deflate the opposition.
Storage Wars – The Musical ?
STORAGE WARS – THE MUSICAL: Channel 7 is currently trotting out endless reruns of the original Storage Wars in which a bunch of thrift shop owners and the like bid on the contents of lockers abandoned by their owners. In the new season the lockers are all full of Elvis impersonators, both good and bad (some even dead!). The buyers only get to hear them sing when they successfully bid, with the option of signing them to a Las Vegas contract or flogging off their sequined jumpsuits.
And yes you asked for it reality fans:
NAKED DATING IN ICELAND: Couples from all over the world converge naked on a glacier in Iceland to match with a potential partner. Shrinkage and erectile dysfunction are no excuse as the horniest couples are rewarded with a 30min karaoke session with Bjork and an unlimited supply of canned herrings.