Have you ever wanted to see a US soldier bricking himself because he thinks he’s heard a bear? Of course you have. We all have. Thankfully, some benevolent television executive clocked that and made Alone for us: 10 people are dumped in the wilderness, completely alone (geddit), competing to see who can survive the longest and win US$500,000.
Here’s the kicker: none of the contestants know how well anyone else is doing, so they have to just keep going until everyone else drops out. “It’s the type of thing you see on the news, where a guy gets lost in the woods, and we’re purposefully doing it,” says one early contestant, sounding as if he’s just realised what those 400 waivers were for.
At first, Alone might sound like the worst kind of reality TV. We’ve seen thousands of shows about guys who want to drink their own wee and stomp around a forest; at this point, most of us would politely invite them to stay there.
But in every season of Alone – without fail – the blowhards drop out quickly when things get too hard, or too wet, or too scary. Like Desmond, the aforementioned army man. Oh Desmond. In the first episode of season two, Desmond brags that he’ll “come back 20 pounds heavier, with a bear skin suit on. You know, from eating the motherfucker”; on his first day he thinks he hears a bear and immediately asks to be taken home.
Alone does seem to trade in middle-aged men who married young and are now desperate for adventure; frankly, the producers could have made another series called Alone that follows the alarming number of pregnant wives and small children being left at home so dad could eat kelp and shout at cougars. But the show’s gender balance does improve with each season as it got more popular, and it becomes more interesting for it.
During Covid, everyone has enjoyed nice shows like Bake Off or Frasier or The Office. But Alone is the nasty, compelling little masterpiece we should have been watching when we were considering using forest leaves for toilet paper and couldn’t hug our families. Because the thing that gets people on Alone is not the bears (or the mere concept of bears) or the starvation or the cold. It’s the solitude.
The contestants don’t even get producers for company, as they’re all trained beforehand to film everything by themselves. They’re also completely separated, usually by distance, water or impassable mountains. (The first two seasons are filmed in northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, while later seasons are in Patagonia, northern Mongolia and other parts of Canada.)
Without the muscly morons or any producers, we’re left alone (geddit) to watch people who truly know how to survive in nature. This means you also learn a lot – how to make a fire, which plants are edible, how to catch fish with a discarded water bottle, even the nutritional value of a fingernail (two calories and one gram of protein, FYI).
And as the contestants grow more skinny and vulnerable, Alone transforms too: the tone gentles into something wonderfully introspective, a meditation on modern life, on patience and gratitude, on our basic needs and wants. Some are broken by the experience (after a week, most people have some kind of a breakdown), while others revel in it (one winner spends his time carving wooden spoons and chopsticks for Christmas gifts when he goes home).
“People are just amazing, we just don’t realise that,” says David, a ex-missionary who, at this point of season two, is six weeks in and so starved that even fishing hurts his body. “We’re social creatures, we’re not supposed to live alone ... I have no one else to talk to, or to depend on, or care for. I think that a signficant motivation in life, that keeps us moving, keeps us going, is to care for someone else.”
Alone is less about the Desmonds, and more about the Davids of the world. And it makes for a very touching and compelling show. After 50-odd days, the first winner (I won’t spoil it) turns to the camera men as they walk towards him and says, disappointed, “This is it? So soon?” And reader, I almost believed him.
Alone is available on SBS On Demand and Binge.
